News Germany Refuses to Increase Subsidies for Intel's Fab

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Don't you just love it when trillion dollar companies want tax payer handouts to expand their empires??

And the "free market" beady-eyed lizards are just fine with throwing your tax payers' money at those behemoths.

But God forbid if a penny is spent helping the poor or the middle class...the anti-welfare flags go up in heartbeat!!
 
Gelsinger probably is still assuming that Germans are made of money, but he should recognise that with no cheap energy and, as soon as Uncle Sam will say the word, no exports to China, Germany is finally become the poor and underdeveloped country "primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character" that was proposed by the Morgenthau plan.
 
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trillion dollar companies want tax payer handouts...the "free market"...

But God forbid if a penny is spent helping the poor or the middle class...the anti-welfare flags go up in heartbeat!!
This.


Gelsinger probably is still assuming that Germans are made of money, but he should recognise that with no cheap energy
Didn't Germany just close their nuclear plants in an effort to "appear go green" but now have to go back to their coal-fired power plants?
 
the "free market" beady-eyed lizards are just fine with throwing your tax payers' money at those behemoths.

But God forbid if a penny is spent helping the poor or the middle class...the anti-welfare flags go up in heartbeat!!
I'm not saying whether Intel really needs these additional subsidies or not, but I do think some balance is needed. If advanced economies want to stay competitive in vital industries, they need to invest in key infrastructure. Otherwise, those industries will simply move to the countries that "get it". We've seen plenty of evidence showing this isn't a mere hypothetical scenario.

So, I think the right solution is to balance investment in industry with other societal priorities. Your wherewithal to tackle any of those other priorities depends on not continually running excessive trade deficits, and that's why infrastructure investments are key. You also need to take care that the investments don't get passed straight through, into the pockets of executives and investors.
 
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But God forbid if a penny is spent helping the poor or the middle class...the anti-welfare flags go up in heartbeat!!
Well, I do not have numbers for Europe or Germany, but my understanding is that the welfare state in Europe is quite extravagant and there are far more pennies being thrown at the poor, which are legion compared to the penny being thrown at Intel. I do not support either form of welfare. But I would actually support the creation of jobs over the handing out of welfare as the jobs provide money to poor people who will work and welfare just makes life harder on everyone not getting the welfare.

But for instance, here in America, our government spends a huge amount of our wealth every year, much of it in taxes, much in deficit spending. Let us look at the spending on corporate welfare vs the individual welfare for poor people, shall we?

6.3 Trillion spending, with only 4.9 trillion in tax revenue, so far so bad... 25.5 trillion GDP, meaning they spent fully 25% of all wealth creation.

Now to the spending, I will just cover the basics and ignore the money going to businesses, because honestly, it is a rounding error in all this once you see what is spent on the poor...

Social Security, 1.2 trillion, Medicare, 760 billion, Medicaid 590 billion, income security programs, 580 billion, student loans 480 billion, other welfare spending 520 billion. Grand total, 4.1 trillion dollars our of 4.9 trillion in taxes and 6.3 trillion in spending.

We also have the military at 750 billion and interest on the debt at 475 billion, 1.2 trillion dollars. On top of all those, we cover infrastructure such as roads and bridges, court systems, government payroll and so forth, I honestly do not know how much of the rest of the trillion dollars is spent on those, but there is only a bit less than 1 trillion dollars left to come up with funding for the roads, bridges, government payroll for which there are 2 million employees earning over 100,000 a year, or 200 billion dollars, leaving less than 800 billion dollars, oh, there is the infrastructure spending, 130 billion dollars, leaving 644 billion for the rest of government and hand outs to the businesses... Let us just go ahead and argue all 644 billion is spent on businesses as welfare payments.

644 billion for companies and 4,100 billion for those poor poor people who refuse to work enough to pay their way through life... greater than a 6 to one spending... Does that fit your view of government spending? And let us be honest, the true amount of government welfare for corporations is far less than the 644 billion, I just gave up looking for where all the rest of the money is going and figure a 6 to one spending poor/business should pretty much blow your world view out of the water.
 
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