Just? You mean they should have received the stupidly large sum of money without anything for the tax payer?

▲ Spivak 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yes? That's what grants are. The government is buying a domestic chip industry with that money.

▲ givemeethekeys 3 days ago | parent [-]

Why shouldn’t they get some equity in return for giving money to a for profit company?

▲ Spivak 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm a bit biased because my home state is Ohio and they have it in their constitution that the state can't have a stake in any private company and can't even lend credit to any private company. And this amendment was written in blood, in the early 19th century the state nearly bankrupted itself investing in and taking stake in private companies.

* The state can't risk taxpayer money on ventures that might not pay off or lose them money. How the state "gets around this" is by issuing zero recourse loans. The advantage is that when economic development money is handed out there's not an asset on the balance sheet. It's treated like it was spent. The value the state gets from spending the money has to be independently worth it for taxpayer without considering financial returns.

* It eliminates a whole category of conflicts of interests where the government will get squeamish regulating or punishing bad behavior because it would hurt the taxpayers' investment.

* It also eliminates vectors for corruption as well as the negative effects of the government having direct influence over specific businesses. No backdoor regulations from the state's ownership stake that don't go through the legislature.

So I'm very heavily in the camp that government shouldn't ever be allowed to have stake in any private company. The line between government and private enterprise should be the wall this admin likes to talk about. I certainly didn't expect it would be republicans I would be trying to convince that state ownership of business is a bad thing.

	▲	andrekandre 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		`> So I'm very heavily in the camp that government shouldn't ever be allowed to have stake in any private company. The line between government and private enterprise should be the wall this admin likes to talk about.` completely agree, private sector should be private and public be public, and the two should never co-mingle (and that includes politicians owning stocks and bonds etc)... right now there is so much corruption (sorry, "investment") it boggles the mind `> I certainly didn't expect it would be republicans I would be trying to convince that state ownership of business is a bad thing.` because they are competing with china and they are wiping the floor with the competition, so they feel they need to do the same i assume
	▲	justin66 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I'm a bit biased because my home state is Ohio and they have it in their constitution that the state can't have a stake in any private company and can't even lend credit to any private company. The Ohio government works around this by cooperating with private “development corporations.”

▲ lokar 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’m not a fan, but it’s been going on for a very long time.

It’s not all that different from development tax incentives which are very common.

I think the grants had some requirements to build up domestic production.

▲ dmix 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They should be doing neither.

America is the last place that is short of capital for industry investments where it requires gov taxes going to it, they have a huge domestic financial market and tons of foreign investment (but those require legitimate plans, not national security woo woo). This is just propping up weak megacorp industry like they did with Boeing, instead of fostering real progress.