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whalesalad

Is this an attempt to prop up Boeing from collapse? Really lame solution if so.

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Boeing will never be allowed to collapse as it's the US's only competitor to Airbus and a major defense contractor.

Should just nationalize it then. Otherwise propping up a company like that is anti-freemarket.

Freemarkets exist in fairytales.

That doesn't seem to answer why we don't just nationalize it.

Because that's a commie move.

It looks much better when you just keep investing in it. Plus shareholders get to make money off the taxpayers in the process.

Partial nationalization exists - Airbus is a good example.

When your biggest customer is the government, it's a more stable approach than the half-assed privatized approach which really means more corruption.

What makes you so sure the government would do a better job at running Boeing?

Are there any examples where a nationalized US organization is doing better than it's private industry counterparts?

737-MAX issues aside, Boeing is doing very well in just about every other aspect of their business, which is quite vast in scope. Everything from rocket ships to commercial airliners that aren't 737-MAX variants...

Yawn. Sure, like any ideal. I feel like you thought this would be revelatory. There exists a spectrum, I'd like to see us lean freer. Or at least not do weird back handed crony capitalism and just come out and nationalize.

Yawn. Sure, like any ideal. I feel like you thought this would be revelatory.

Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. There's nothing new to say about any of them and they inevitably degrade as they go—perhaps because the mind looks to conflict to amuse itself in the absence of any new information.

Yes, the GP comment went halfway there but that's not a good reason to go the whole hog.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

It kinda already is right? Many of their defense contracts end up being practically blank checks.

Ditto for Airbus.

One of the risks of consolidation.

The EU subsidized Airbus for decades to enable it to compete with Boeing. China does the same with many of their industries. Japan and Korea did the same before them. Every country has an interest in having strong industry.

> Every country has an interest in having strong industry.

And if you don't already have one and have to incentivize someone to take on that challenge, that makes sense.

If you already have _several_ manufacturers, the last thing you should do is allow them to consolidate down into a single monopoly.

The US has played it's hand exceptionally poorly.

Yes, the US's industrial policy over the past several decades has been a disaster that squandered most of the benefits we accrued from being the only major country that didn't have to rebuild after WWII.

I don't disagree. One thing that came to mind the other day, as I remembered how a family member of mine lost their job at a national airplane company. Their job prospects were very slim and required moving across the country. The industry is very specialized. I dislike tariffs as much as the next globalist but I do feel for family. Conflicted, you might say.

This sounds like welfare with extra steps

Agreed. Unlike other countries, the USA are allergic to the word "welfare", so they have to go through all these convoluted steps to do the same thing

The more extra steps the more ethically murky it gets.

Is creating a regulatory environment where public infrastructure construction and maintenance prices soar to astronomical levels because you have three people getting paid hourly to supervise one guy who's running a pavement miller "welfare" or is it crony capitalism for the construction industry?

I'm fine with welfare, but thinly veiled handouts to politically connected groups seems a hell of a lot less efficient way to better society than just directly funding or tax-incentivizing homeless shelters and food pantries. Also some of the shadier cases of "well if you put a positive spin on it then this is just welfare" behavior are too graft-like for my tastes.

Well yes, but this way you're only giving welfare to some highly skilled people (plus useless execs) who also happen to be useful in wartime. Not the kind of people you want to loose long term.

The EU also subsidizes Airbus, agriculture and other critical industries.

More people can become the kind of people who are useful in wartime if they aren't struggling to survive.

It's to penalize AirBus for being propped by France and Germany, supposedly.

Wine and liquor got caught up in the mix somehow too.

It's all due to digital taxing companies like Apple, Google, Amazon.

France put in a 3% tax on digital services, some other countries did it as well. The EU as a whole plans to do a 3% tax on all digital services in 2021.

The US is angry about it, since all the major tech companies happen to be american.

>The US is angry about it, since all the major tech companies happen to be american.

And chineese. This new Whatsapp thingy would have been another disaster in Europe if we were not protected by the RGPD.

Whatsapp is owned by Facebook though?

I'd still get off of it and have been recommending Signal or Telegram to anyone that listens.

Chinese media tech companies don’t do much business outside of China. Alibaba already gets taxed as a retailer. Zoom actually sells something.

And this won't change with the Biden administration since he's been propped up by these very same companes.

> it's all due to digital taxing companies like Apple, Google, Amazon.

Citation needed.

Isn't this just part of: https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds316_e...

It is beyond the scope of this settlement?

https://taxfoundation.org/us-tariffs-on-french-goods-digital...

Penalizing one competitor in a duopoly is rewarding the other.

I suspect yes, which is why it excludes Japan where large 787 subassemblies are made.

I don't know, but it's a complicated question since Boeing uses European suppliers (e.g. Safran) and has its own manufacturing operations in Europe.

Edit: Actually, the factory I'm referring to is in the UK.

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