Billionaire Welfare Queens and Their Sycophants
Elon Musk has taken in at least $38 billion in subsidies and federal contracts, not counting the $1.5 billion EV subsidy Tesla took advantage of from President Barack Obama's 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The ARRA gave a $7,500 per vehicle subsidy to electric vehicle purchases.
In total, that $39.5 billion in subsidies amounts to $470 for every one of the 84.2 million American families. That means the average family is $470 poorer because of Elon Musk.
Billionaire and trillionaire sycophants counter that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin and the other super-wealthy provide services to the American government, that these services are "worth it," and that if they hadn't provided the services or taken the subsidies someone else would have. Arguing that government green electronic vehicle subsidies and contracts for spy satellites that facilitate warrantless surveillance of the American people are "worth it" sounds a lot like an argument a leftist greenie and a loyalist of the military-industrial complex would make, respectively. It's definitely not an argument in favor of a true free market. Interestingly, most of the richest billionaires are in the tech sector, and their contracts are typically with the military and intelligence agencies. ...
Jeff Bezos' Amazon has more than half a dozen billion-dollar-plus contracts with the federal government right now, and has used those contracts to censor critics of the state, like when his Amazon Web Services shut down the conservative social media site Parler in 2021. Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page) also participated in this censorship of Parler on behalf of the incoming Joe Biden administration, and has many contracts with the federal government worth billions, including a recent $200 million contract with US.. intelligence services signed in April. I could go down the list of all the richest billionaires in America, and how their companies are dependent upon government contracts for much of their wealth.
Conservatives and even many libertarians tend to castigate welfare recipients among the poor but champion billionaires as pillars of capitalism. But this is a mistake in principle, and more importantly it's a grave tactical error if free market distortions are ever to be tamped down. No amount of scapegoating of the poor will ever endanger warrantless surveillance, a war for oil, or any other serious threat to our freedoms. Scapegoating the poor probably won't even lower the level of money being put out for welfare very much, considering the voting demographics.
The average American taxpayer may be made a bit poorer because of the food stamp program, but unlike billionaire contracts, Americans are not made less free by an individual family on food stamps. Moreover, the per-person scale is off the charts larger for billionaires. Poor people receive an average of $715 per month for a family of four on food stamps. Even if that family stayed on food stamps for forty years it wouldn't amount to a tenth of a penny for each family across the US. Cumulatively, the SNAP program costs taxpayers a little over $100 billion annually for its 41.7 million recipients. Put another way, Elon Musk alone has absorbed more of your tax dollars than fifteen million recipients of food stamps this year.
The key difference here is that subsidies for billionaires take away core freedoms of all American families, while SNAP benefits just feed poor families. ...
No poor voter, and very few middle class voters, have any financial incentive to continue subsidies to billionaires. These subsidies persist because the attention of the masses is directed elsewhere to endless, mindless and fruitless discussions (on the Left) about how billionaires supposedly aren't taxed enough and (on the Right) about immigration or how great billionaires are in bringing products like government spy satellites to market. ...
It's time people across the political spectrum join forces in an ad hoc manner and demand an end to cronyism.
Continue reading at: https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/billionaire-welfare-queens-and-their-sycophants/
