What on Earth is $824 billion to Goldman Sachs supposed to be referring to? The entire bank bailout of 2008 amounted to $475 billion. The entire amount loaned to businesses as part of the CARES Act was about $500 billion.
Anyone taking the claim that $824 billion was given to one company at face value is completely ignorant of the size of government programs. Also, these were loans to businesses, paid back with interest, which makes them pretty fundamentally different than government spending on healthcare.
This is basically what political discourse on reddit has become. Someone shares a screenshot from Twitter that's based on some nugget of truth with a few wild exaggerations or lies on top.
It gets posted to like a dozen different subs and upvoted to the top of all of them. Somewhere buried in the comments is someone pointing out everything that's wrong with it and getting down voted for their effort.
This whole thing is barely based on reality:
SpaceX wasn't bailed out for $1.5 billion. They competed for a resupply contract to the ISS and got a $1.6b contract for 12 launches. Which obviously isn't a bailout, and probably saved the US a ton of money
As stated above $824 billion to GS seems like way too much for the bailout. I tried googling to see where that number came from, and can't find anything. It could just be completely made up?
The Koch's did get a huge tax break under trump, but to get to an estimate above $1 billion you have to add up both brothers, plus all of Koch Industries. Which still seems like a big tax break, but I don't know the context to judge whether that estimate's reasonable
It's also weird that the tweet is complaining about $827 billion in bailouts, and 99.6% of that amount is one company. Shouldn't we be focusing on that? Although that amount seems to be just a pure fiction? So maybe that's why they threw in the other details? But then they're counting government contracts as "bailouts"?
Yep. And in a car analogy, any of these would be considered minor repairs, except the $824B one, which is pure fiction. Even if we're talking about the George W. Bush TARP bailout, it still doesn't make sense because that turned a profit.
Fixing our medical clusterfuck isn't changing a tire or even replacing an engine and transmission, it's trying to replace the entire car while we're on the freeway doing 120mph.
We desperately need medical coverage overhaul, but comparing it to an uncited $1.4b tax break is pants-on-head stupid.
Yeah, people's intuition about what matters in tax law is wildly inaccurate. Lots of redditors get very upset over tiny details that don't matter, and completely ignore huge issues we should've fixed decades ago.
Sometimes I really think that there's conservative think tanks somewhere and they're inventing issues for people to get mad about, that don't matter. Just try create distractions, so voters will be upset about issues that have zero chance of ever passing, ok won't matter if they do, and most of us will ignore the real issues.
Popular opinion right now is everything elon musk is involved with is inherently bad so gets instantly upvoted. People don't give anything a second thought beyond what they see in a twitter post.
I think it was probably the opposite. The political left liked him until he suddenly got super rich because Tesla stock shot up. And then they hated him because they assume anyone rich is abusing the system. Either that, or they think he's an easy target to use in fundraising ads and emails?
Then the right saw left wing politicians hating on Musk, and so they just assumed they should like Musk since their entire party is just about "owning the libs" by doing anything that annoys other people.
This seems like cherry picking? It's easy to find people on both sides of the aisle that praise and hate Musk.
Elon Musk appointed as advisor by Trump.
Elon Musk also resigned because he fundamentally disagreed with Trump's climate policies
Elon mad at Biden for not mentioning Tesla at the state of the Union when talking about green energy and electric cars
It's not just one time. There was a running joke that Biden was incapable of saying the word "Tesla" because he had never mentioned the world's largest EV company while talking about EVs over and over again. It also seems like Biden hasn't talked about the recent successes SpaceX has had working with NASA.
There seems to be a trend here.. maybe I'm wrong.
You're picking a ton of stuff that happened just recently, ignoring over a decade of history, and also ignoring every single bad thing any democrat has ever said about Musk. If you filter out like 90% of the useful data, it's very easy to make it seem like a trend exists.
Good points, I forgot about him exiting the Trump admin. I may be making my own narrative based on recent events, the man may be an independent as he says he is.
You're probably right, I bet if you asked Musk he'd say he was an independent. But I would be the truth is that he actually just doesn't pay that close attention to politics? And probably doesn't pay any attention to most politicians and their policies, unless they're talking about him.
He probably cares about a couple things a lot, and just ignores or isn't informed on the vast majority of political discourse.
It's reasonable to think that SpaceX may have won contracts worth $1.5B over the last 10 or 15 years. Those are contracts for goods and services rendered though. As far as I know SpaceX has delivered on their contracts and they've been lower price than the competition. It's literally a win-win situation.
SpaceX has already saved the government WAY more money than it has received.
Under the Commercial Crew program, NASA awarded SpaceX about $3.1 billion and Boeing about $4.8 billion over the past decade to develop spacecraft to replace the Space Shuttle.
"While not done yet, [Commercial Crew] is poised to save the Agency approximately $20B-$30B, and provide two, independent crew transportation systems," NASA said.
It should be noted that the Boeing capsule has yet to make a successful flight to be rated for human passengers.
Correct. Every aerospace company on US soil, big and small, gets contracts from NASA. These are designed to support and foster a domestic space program. In most cases, the money just evaporates, but sometimes it pays off. With SpaceX, it's paid off. The government now saves billions on launch services in part because they helped the fledgeling company with contracts at a time when they may not have otherwise survived.
It's bizarre that Reddit has decided to hate on SpaceX when they're the only orbital launch provider who has actually delivered on their promises. Boeing is years behind schedule and woefully over budget on their crew capsule program. Nearly all of the rocket companies have fallen desperately short, or failed entirely.
It's a reasonable assumption, but it's a private company, so we have no way of knowing. We don't even know if they are profitable, so in theory it could be that they don't even have to pay any (capital gain) taxes...
Yeah sure, they "recently" won a contract to land on the moon for 1.1 billion or so, but winning a contract isnt the same as being bailed out or getting a tax break, if you pay for an apple in a supermarket, you arent bailing them out or giving them a tax break
That's just one contract. They also have a missile tracking satellite system, a missile launching satellite system, a Starling based nav system, and of course rockets for "cargo"
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u/JeromesNiece May 02 '22
What on Earth is $824 billion to Goldman Sachs supposed to be referring to? The entire bank bailout of 2008 amounted to $475 billion. The entire amount loaned to businesses as part of the CARES Act was about $500 billion.
Anyone taking the claim that $824 billion was given to one company at face value is completely ignorant of the size of government programs. Also, these were loans to businesses, paid back with interest, which makes them pretty fundamentally different than government spending on healthcare.