cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/22960194
If a business constantly needs subsidies to stay afloat… Perhaps it should be a publically owned federal entity.
I used to work for a small software company in Louisiana. Part of our “business model” involved a $12 million per year bit of federal government pork that was granted to an organization that had a fancy-sounding name but was administered by one of our employees who operated out of a closet-sized office in a different building. For some reason our company was not able to just pocket this money (which I’m sure would have been our preference), so instead the money (which was ostensibly meant for improving industrial processes in the state) was given to a large defense industry corporation - not in Louisiana - and in return we were given lucrative consulting contracts by this corporation. Somewhat hilariously, my company was never on the list of this corporation’s approved contractors but we got the gigs anyway, which always prompted the people we worked with to question what the hell we were doing there in the first place.
Naturally enough, the owners of my company were conservatives (who prayed to Jesus to end company-wide meetings) who liked to rant about the “welfare queens” destroying this country.
Wealthy corporations need public money because otherwise they’ll raise prices so high that it will collapse “the economy” and risk societal collapse. This is different from extortion because politicians make the laws and take a very small amount of this money for themselves.
“The economy” is the vampiric system where the people who do all the work get squeezed to death to make money for parasites who tell them “the economy” must be protected at all costs because reasons.
Everytime one hears a politician or media commentator harping about “the Economy growing” one should instantly ask “for whom?”.
In fact, asking yourself “who is that really good for?” and “what’s the point of telling me this?” is a pretty good general mental self-defense mechanism for handling the modern style of discourse from people trying to convince you to do something or form an opinion about them, using success stories - pretty much all such stories are self-serving in some way and generally either exagerated or lying by omission.
I’ve tried shutting up about Bob, believe me!
Republicans: “Buh, buh, Bob is brown!”
It’s not even that Bob is brown. It’s that Bob could be brown.
They don’t care if the money goes to white people. They HATE that it could go towards brown people.
Bob is clearly a bright green.
Subsidies for fossil fuels need to go, but this isn’t exactly a fair comparison. How many people get $1500? You gotta at least compare total values.
“Bob” is supposed to represent an average, or a common man, at least. Your focus is off.
Why? Shell’s not the only corporation
How does that change anything? THE TOTALS SHOULD BE COMPARED. Not exactly going to be millions of corporations getting billions of dollars.
The totals should be compared ON A MAXIMIZATION OF RETURNS sense - i.e. how much good is done for each dollar being spent.
Giving money to people with lots of money - which is what corporate subsidies do, as that money ends up indirectly (and at times even directly) in the hands of shareholders - is just giving money to mainly very rich people and some middle class ones (who hold proportionally tiny amounts have shares either direct or via things like their pension fund), who need it far less than the kind of people who wouldn’t be able to feed their family without those $1500 per year.
In fact the very same logic also justifies progressive taxation (if done properly without loopholes for the very rich) - every extra dollar in the hands of a poor or low earner person, no matter how it gets there (be it less tax or social security) has thousands, even millions and in some cases billions of times the utility value of every extra dollar in the hands of a rich person, not just in direct terms of the benefits it brings for that person and their family but even in Economic terms because they spend every cent they get, so that money circulates a lot more in the Economy, doing good for others as it does so.
One of biggest swindles in the discourse of modern neoliberal politicians is exactly to go around celebrating the good they do with taxpayers’s money (or by “saving people from having to pay as much tax”) whilst never showing or even discussing if that is the best possible use of that money, because generally its not, which is how we end up with corporates being subsidized and the very well off getting tax cuts whilst the money could’ve yielded far more massive returns if used differetly, not just in terms of a better life for more people but often even in purelly Economic terms, such as how, for example, State investment in free Education tends to all in all yield an actual profit for the nations that do it.
I don’t think you need millions getting billions to equal all the Bobs. If there are 50 million Bobs getting $1500, you only need about 40 corporations getting $2B to exceed them.
Because this is about Bob
