Eh, sure congress has apparently only passed 1 bill so far this year [1] but you can go look up other split years (i.e. 2013 [2]) as a reference. They actually pass a lot of bills despite what people say and the first 4 months of the session are always slow.
Ohio is a R state so republicans won't bring up deficit issues (not that they actually care about them). Democrats (obviously) voted yes on the CHIPs act last year so its not like they're going to change their mind now. The remaining parties aren't a large enough coalition to matter.
> It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be competitive
Unless you're going to argue the USG is going to become insolvent prior to Intel finishing the fab in Ohio this is an irrelevant argument. The USG will be around longer than it takes to build a fab and as I brought up in my previous comment; plenty of companies are not competitive on a global scale but they still turn a healthy profit because the USG backstops them.
> In the end subsidies just contribute to rising inflation (it's printing money)
Well, you can subsidize something without printing money. I think printing money causing inflation has been trivial disproven though by the 2019 pandemic where governments printed money like mad and no inflation occurred until years after the fact. Unless of course you want to argue the free markets are so inefficient they took 2-3 years to correct for that money printing?
[1]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2023?type=bill&status=pa... [2]: https://legiscan.com/US/legislation/2013?sort=asc&order=Last...
I'm not so sure about that. At an individual level sure but we're talking about the USG not a bunch of individuals at a national level. The government has made many decisions to subsidies/backstop local companies in the interest of nationalism.
There's no way it's cheapest for Boeing to make its airplanes in the US.
Janitors for the USG get security clearances.
Farmers (even by state governments) get subsidized to ensure local supply.
If something like the "Freedom Phone" actually used USA parts and was assembled in the USA I could see it becoming the governments defacto corporate phone. Sure, they might become a "Government Contractor" as opposed to an actually competitive company but they would still exist with real buildings and real employees doing real activies which is strictly what we're arguing about. The USG will backstop an inefficient business; Foxconn has no problem not building an inefficient factory.