Many people in this country want their chances to be better, and not have those opportunities distributed evenly. They want a shot of improving their status by ascending career, wealth, and opportunity gradients. This is how they vote. This is how companies operate too.
On the flip side, true universal equity doesn't even stop at the national boarder. If you're a proponent of equitability for all, then you want to distribute all high income jobs, housing, medical care, and wealth all around the world and give everyone access and good chances. To some degree this has happened with manufacturing. In time it will happen to knowledge work as well.
There are problems with both models of the world. Power and resources become concentrated. With slowing growth, wealth building up the lower class of one nation leads to the eroding of the middle class in another.
It's unclear to me that these choices are even the ones that will dominate the future outcomes for our civilization. It's resource reallocation. The big trends will be war, technological disruptions, and ecosystem changes.
That's not the point presented by the OP. If he was to advance such a point, he'll have to cite a research that shows that investing in poorer families will lead to semi-conductor advancement in the country.
Unless you think the US (or any reasonably advanced big economy) doesn't need a competitive semi-conductor industry.
Maybe our elected representatives simply agree that national security is a priority just like the people who voted them into office?
This is exactly how lobbying works, and it's depressing how insanely cheap our countries are being sold for.
- https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forg...
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/05/14/how...
For example, if a corporation doesn't like that the IRS is scrutinizing them they can just lobby congress to gut the IRS.
https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-to...
Think you can have an effect by contacting your elected officials? Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed. Not to mention all the gerrymandering...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
A better explanation for The American Jobs Creation Act is probably the fact that republicans support lower taxes, and they won in 2016.
Regarding the Microsoft case with the IRS, perhaps the fact that everyone hates the IRS is a better explanation?
>Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed. Why would it have a significant impact? We don't pass laws by poll.
>Not to mention all the gerrymandering This one seems real from what I've seen, but I need to look into it more, and I don't think it should be tied very closely to money in politics.
No, I don’t believe the senators looked at this with an unbiased mind and came to this conclusion on their own volition. Much rather, they rely on some funding for their campaigning, and said funding had a deep influence on their decision. Not rational thinking.
Senators aren’t unbiased. They’re biased towards what their voters want. If they step out of line, they’ll likely get crushed.
I don’t think money in politics is very explanatory. It seems a basic understanding of the 3 branches and the interplay between the states and federal government explains a lot.
For that to be true there would have to be some dissonance between what voters actually want and to what their representatives actually deliver. If you don’t believe this dissonance exist, then sure, there is nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. I on the other hand, not only believe such dissonance exist, but is a fundamental flaw in our democracy.
This is a big reason why Roe was never codified imo
I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.
(Not so clear, personally, how you justify transposing this semiconductor handout to the more superficially defensible “national security”; but see also fossil fuel subsidies, corporate tax breaks, barring negotiated drug pricing: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/amazing-ro... )
As for “why is it so cheap”? I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
It’s very low effort for a corporation to threaten to offshore and ask for a handout to not follow through on the threat. And it’s a very easy call for the politician to take the bribe, because then they can go back their constituency and say “We saved your jobs from going to China!” Everybody wins except the taxpayers. (And the corporations will go ahead and offshore, or not, just like they would have anyway, because one of the services they pay their lobbyists for is ensuring there will be no consequences for accepting the handout.)
This is wrong. That's not what lobbying is understood to be. I think you're confusing lobbying with campaign contributions or PAC money. Lobbying is basically just advocating.
>I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
That's fair. I was imprecise: I should have made it explicit that I was speaking about lobbying in America:
> The one big difference between the US and the EU is that the majority of policymakers in the EU institutions are not elected, and since they do not need to stand for elections, they do not need to find the significant amounts of cash to support campaigns. Instead of spending innumerable hours fundraising, they balance competing interests in an effort to produce policies that are seen as legitimate, though produced by a less-than-democratic supranational structure. https://www.politico.eu/article/why-lobbying-in-america-is-d...
US Lobbyists funneled a total of 3.77 billion dollars into campaign coffers in 2021, and are already over 2 billion for 2022. I hope it's not necessary to point out that they're not doing that without the expectation of a return on that investment (and as we've already seen, they absolutely are getting that ROI.)
> That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
Not sure I see how it's dodging the question, especially since my following paragraph continues not dodging it in greater detail.... but setting that aside, the obvious answer to "why are there so few funding sources" is "there is a finite number of wealthy individuals and organizations", with a side order of "and they tend to consolidate their lobbying activities into industry groups". (To be specific, in 2022 that finite number is 11,441.)
Is there? Or is there just more consensus among the elite and Ivy League educated who dominate security discussion and policy?
In the abstract it seems much easier to get alignment on a national security question (especially one as cut and dry as this one, which is don’t let your nation’s semiconductor supply fall under the control of a hostile foreign country), than it is to get alignment on a much more ideological and philosophical question about how to solve poverty.
There is nothing abstract in politics and that's just plain old "begging the question".
> especially one as cut and dry as this one, which is don’t let your nation’s semiconductor supply fall under the control of a hostile foreign country
Cut and dry to whom? And were it so cut and dry why is a subsidy the solution rather than any number of other legislative actions?
> than it is to get alignment on a much more ideological and philosophical question about how to solve poverty
Free lunch for students is hardly an attempt to "solve poverty".
On one subject you are asking to do politics in a vacuum because it is the status quo and on the other imply a heavy ideological weight.
In reality both things are equally ideological, the only difference you're asserting is that a nationalistic defense ideology should be taken for granted and perhaps that it is popular.
I think it's pretty cut and dry to people who pay attention to what fuels a modern economy: semiconductors. If you have a problem with the subsidies themselves that's a disagreement about implementation, and to an extent I would agree that some additional tariffs are in order - beyond the subsidies.
>Free lunch for students is hardly an attempt to "solve poverty".
Well sure, but any time someone disagrees with the policy of "free lunches" (as if there was such a thing) you get asked "what, do you hate poor people"? Which sends you down a spiral of debate on what the appropriate policy should be to solve a complex problem ... like poverty.
>the only difference you're asserting is that a nationalistic defense ideology should be taken for granted and perhaps that it is popular.
I'm asserting that semiconductors are what make things comfortable in modern society, which isn't really a contested point as far as I'm aware. I'm not really making any commentary on the wisdom of a "nationalistic defense ideology", which in my mind would be something quite different and go much further than "subsidies for building chips in the US".
I'm sensing that a lot of the hostility in this thread has to do with how we already spend so much money on the MIC, and while it's true that we do spend a lot of money on the MIC, semiconductors are markedly different, because military hardware and weapons aren't consumer products. Semiconductors go into everything. I feel like I'm repeating myself here, and it seems odd to me because I would've expected folks on this website to understand this.
That's a value judgementon your part which happens to agree with what passes for wisdom in the natsec press and that's literally my entire point. Justifying a government action as status quo opinion is how a status quo is maintained and how an entire class of journalism and foreign policy acts as if the world is its oyster and as if there is no alternative. This is literally the hypothesis of manufacturing consent.
> Well sure, but any time someone disagrees with the policy of "free lunches" (as if there was such a thing) you get asked "what, do you hate poor people"?
You're not talking to "anyone", you're talking to me and I never made that point.
> I feel like I'm repeating myself here, and it seems odd to me because I would've expected folks on this website to understand this.
I'm not sure what other conversations you've had but I'm not arguing the merits of some semiconductor protectionism. I'm arguing against the OPs shrug that we should uncritically accept this spending because it's an outflowing of the Democratic process.
Would adding three more carrier groups to the Pacific likewise be a cut and dry question? What about scuttling three carrier groups? What about another three hundred ICBMs to the nuclear arsenal? Hundred-year leases on seven new army bases in Poland? Another trillion or two on building a new fighter jet?
These all seem about as cut and dry. Which is to say, not at all.
It's correct to observe that piling mountains of money into the military-industrial complex tends to have consensus in Congress, but let's not confuse that with the questions having a 'cut and dry' answer.
So, yeah, it really is that cut and dry. A "National Security Issue" doesn't always mean "weapon" or "air craft carrier". This is a rare moment when, even if it's for cynical and self-serving reasons, some money is going to be spent on something that actually matters and will help secure future prosperity. Do get mad about the MIC, though. I still am as well.
That's the only acceptable answer to that question.
I encourage you to attend some meetings of your local party Republican or Democrat (whichever is dominant) and see how the people you get to elect are chosen. What you'll find is the folks controlling that process are deeply under the influence of a status quo and that most unorthodoxy there is very quickly marginalized.
People who have been involved in politics and have experience with budgets and governing SHOULD be the ones making decisions.
Next time you get heart surgery, ask for the fringe thinking fresh college grad and see how that goes.
IMO, this preference has lead to a clear preference for statism and state violence amongst our elected officials as the people who rise through the rabks tend toward an implicit trust in the institutions of the martial state from the criminal justice sysyem to a standing military.
And in my experience this has a lot to do the low level party operatives whose hands are on the scale at the primary level.
How many marginalized people actually ever make it into office? Virtually none and so that is a perspective that is completely unrepresented. It's stalwart statists all the way down, they mostly just disagree on what the state violence should be used to enforce.
And alas, USA is one of the least represented democracies in the world at 596,060 constituents per legislator. Compared to China’s 454,930, Brazil’s 353,783, South Africa’s 98,726 or France’s 71,631 constituent per legislator.
Of that 11%, there is a 1% chance the resulting vote aligns with the preferences of the median earner
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
People's opinions are highly correlated with elite opinions, of course (because elites control what they hear, read, and see, and whether they'll progress in their careers or be employed at all), but when there's a divergence, public opinion is followed 0% of the time.
That's not what I asked. I asked for an issue supported by voters, not population. A lot of people have opinions, but not many people vote, which skews actual legislation. There's also a conservative tilt because rural voters have disproportionate power.
The populist "it's the elite and their money controlling legislation" sentiment doesn't seem to correlate with reality from what I've read.
On healthcare, the support of socialization is complicated. Voters are iffy depending on how questions are phrased, so it's not totally clear on exactly what they want. It seems something like the ACA was pretty close, but even that was very controversial.
For example, I know you can get very high approval for M4A, but if you phrase questions in a more partisan manner, approval tanks. Something along the lines of "Would you support government provided healthcare that would ban private insurance?" would poll terribly, even though they're both referring to the same policy.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/2187
Would have allowed for professionals in a given field to be accredited to make investments related to their profession. Or to put it another way, you would no longer need to already be rich to use the tools that the rich use to get richer.
The bill was passed unanimously in the house, and then quietly killed in the senate.
5 years later, we got a neutered version. Now you can make investments if you get a series 7 license, etc. But from what I understand you can’t just take the test and get the license, you need to be sponsored by an institution, but that misses the point of the original bill that represented the actual will of the people.
I'll have to look into it more though.
* Medicare for all: 55% support, 32% oppose.
* Civil asset forfeiture: 16% support, 86% oppose.
[0]: https://morningconsult.com/2021/03/24/medicare-for-all-publi...
I'm getting throttled so I might not be able to reply in a timely fashion.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/senate-democrats-unveil-long...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-...
Consensus among whom? Congress?
Poll after poll demonstrates that people care more about economic issues that affect them directly than spending more on military when the US already spends ridiculous amounts over their nearest competitors.
This is not going to increase skilled labor in a meaningful way so I would not frame it as providing jobs that will get people out of subsidized programs.
“But free school lunches also provide a positive ROI!” I agree with you, now convince your representative of it.
That's misleading framing, that's derailing discussion about this.
More accurately: there's more consensus around national security spending than social spending. The government has decided it would rather have the economy depend on large American companies for these critical components than on large Chinese companies.
And that might have follow-on effects that mean more jobs for Americans so fewer kids are poor and need subsidized school lunches.
I suppose if you're unhappy with that write your senators, and ask them to pass laws requiring purchases from the lowest-cost global supplier (e.g. not American), and use the money saved for welfare subsidies.