If one only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.
John Stossel’s latest YouTube video focuses on the many ways “your tax dollars end up in millionaires’ pockets.”
In an interview with Lisa Conyers, co-author of Welfare for the Rich, they deplore how recent COVID Relief funds went to state governments already flush with surpluses and, disproportionately, to wealthier local communities.
“Politicians also give your money to companies that promise jobs,” explains Stossel, using as an example the Ohio case wherein General Motors closed its Lordstown plant . . . after receiving tens of millions of tax dollars to keep it open.
Regarding Wisconsin’s Foxconn subsidy, Conyers notes that it came to a million bucks per job. Actually, Stossel corrects, the cost of each Foxconn job was $1.42 million.
Soon the subject shifts to the spectacular subsidies billionaire sports team owners receive for their lavish stadiums. Some folks apparently still think this welfare is an investment that pays off by stimulating greater economic activity. But Stossel points out the stark math: $188 billion in welfare to the wealthy sports moguls and $40 billion back in benefits.
“The Vikings stadium is so nice,” Bob Fastner deadpans in a comment left at YouTube, “that I can’t afford to go inside.”
“20 years ago, our small town almost subsidized a sports stadium for all the reasons your program described,” offers Friendly One in another comment. “A small independent radio station brought the true financial history of such projects to public awareness, stopped it. It became a thriving business center instead.”
“The politicians don’t call each other out on this and just continue stealing from us,” observes Kiki The Great. “Something all of us can agree on,” comments Mr. Beat. “End corporate welfare!”
Left or right, we don’t support corporate welfare — so why is there so much of it?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse, and impulses express a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason or the Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Society (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), p. 138.
Every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberties by every other man.
Herbert Spencer, Social Statics: or, The Conditions essential to Happiness specified, and the First of them Developed, (London: John Chapman, 1851), Pt. II, Ch. 4 : Derivation of a First Principle, § 3.
The tyranny of Mrs. Grundy is worse than any other tyranny we suffer under.
Herbert Spencer, “On Manners and Fashion,” The Westminster Review (April 1854), as reprinted in Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, Vol. III (D. Appleton, 1891).
Journalist Tom Lemons may be jailed up to twenty years for investigating the Dawn Center, a shelter for victims of domestic violence in Hernando County, Florida.
Lemons talked to former employees and to women who sought help there. He learned about theft of donations, filthy conditions, and a chronically lawless atmosphere.
Now he is on trial for what he says are trumped-up charges designed to stop him from telling the tale. Lemons details his tribulations in his book Victim Shopping 101: The truth doesn’t always set you free.
The alleged cover-up may not be limited to the county sheriff’s office and county politicians. The Florida legislature has passed a law making it illegal to identify women’s shelters.
According to a recent press release by State Senator Ileana Garcia, “Senate Bill 70 makes it a first degree misdemeanor, or a felony upon a second or subsequent conviction [to maliciously disclose] any descriptive information or image that may identify the location of a certified domestic violence center.”
So . . . arrest the Internet?
As Lemons tells PJ Media’s Megan Fox, the shelter “promotes their services and fundraising events all the time on social media.” The point of the law, he believes, is only to stop him from distributing his documentary about the shelter, Behind the Gate, which the statute would outlaw.
Lemons’ April 28 interview is on YouTube.
Fox urges Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to do something to counter this travesty of justice. Vetoing SB 70 would be a start.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On April 30, 1902, economist Theodore W. Schultz was born. His work studying the quick post-war recovery in Germany and Japan led to his development of “human capital theory,” explicated in books such as Investing in People (1981) and several major papers, including “Investing in human capital” (1961) and “Transforming traditional agriculture” (1964).
He was co-winner (with William Arthur Lewis) of the 1979 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Schultz died in 1998.
On April 29, 1945, U.S. troops of the Seventh Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp.
On April 28, 1788, Maryland became the seventh state to ratify the United States Constitution.
On April 24, 1792, the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” was composed by Capt. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
Eight years later to the day, the United States Congress approved a bill establishing the Library of Congress.