> I'm not falling for your "deadbeat" strawman. If the IT bubble burst, and I was out of a job with no backup plan, who'd be rushing to put me ahead of any othe

> I'm not falling for your "deadbeat" strawman. If the IT bubble burst, and I was out of a job with no backup plan, who'd be rushing to put me ahead of any other dole recipient? At the very least I wouldn't be saying it's a great idea to spend billions of dollars propping up your job when nobody wants your company's services at a price the company can afford to provide them at, and if we have to spend billions of dollars, we might as well spend it on retraining people. > Yes, it is more reasonable to give it to businesses. Wait, precisely why? What's the upside of propping up unprofitable businesses? There's basically two - ensuring that the industry stays in the country, and jobs. Ignoring the first due to it being nearly impossible to put a price on it without knowing what our trade risks re other countries producing steel are, why do we care so much about jobs that we're willing to spend money keeping them around? Well, the answer is that it's essentially welfare that we force people to work to get. > Maybe it is, who knows; what's your the point? That if this investment is a waste, we might as well waste it some other way? If this investment's primary goal is to keep people in jobs, then we might as well provide people with the ability to move into jobs that the economy actually requires, instead of ones which it's categorically stated that it doesn't require.