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If you’re getting bailed out by taxpayers that means you don’t have the money to issue dividends or anything similar, so bills should be written such that issui
by olliej 4y ago
If you’re getting bailed out by taxpayers that means you don’t have the money to issue dividends or anything similar, so bills should be written such that issuing a dividend or whatever would mean you committed fraud in your application for a bailout, or should trigger an immediate repayment of the entire loan.
- rektide 4y agoThis isn't a bailout. Intel posted their first net loss in a long long long long time. They still have a 15B revenue, and plenty of cash on hand. This is funding for investing in US chipmaking. Frankly, America is uncompetitive, owing to a an expensive labor pool (high cost of living) and adversarial operating environment (lots of legal & regulatory hurdles). As I see it, this funding exists to pay the difference, to get chip-makers like Intel to do it here anyways, even though there's no business sense. Because chipmaking is an existential risk, a necessity for modern civilization, and the thought of not having access to it is unimaginably awful. If this money came with a million strings strings attached, Intel probably wouldn't take it. This money is a carrot. But hopefully one that indeed does end up encouraging the needed results.
- olliej 4y agoThe strings are: use this money to invest in production. That doesn't seem like much of a string. If that string is too much, would a better law be "give money to executives and stockholders of semiconductor companies and ask the semiconductor companies to invest money that they're claiming they don't have"? If you disagree with that interpretation of what you're saying, I'd like you to explain how prohibiting then from simply taking the money and forwarding it to execs and stockholders is a problem?