[InvisibleCities]

This has nothing do with people’s civic engagement levels, and everything to do with money. The semiconductor industry gets a massive subsidy because they spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying - impoverished schoolchildren get left to starve because they don’t.

[jobgh]

You honestly think tens of millions in lobbying efforts cause a tens of billions return on investment? Why is it so insanely cheap?

Maybe our elected representatives simply agree that national security is a priority just like the people who voted them into office?

[richbell]

> You honestly think tens of millions in lobbying efforts cause a tens of billions return on investment? Why is it so insanely cheap?

This is exactly how lobbying works, and it's depressing how insanely cheap our countries are being sold for.

- https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forg...

- https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/05/14/how...

For example, if a corporation doesn't like that the IRS is scrutinizing them they can just lobby congress to gut the IRS.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the-irs-decided-to-get-to...

Think you can have an effect by contacting your elected officials? Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed. Not to mention all the gerrymandering...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[runarberg]

I doubt it. The parallels of this rhetoric from the war on terror is stark. You can put anything under the umbrella of national security, and your average senator is perfectly aware of that. A theoretical threat to semiconductor distribution pails in comparison to the actual threat of climate change or the real threat of poverty which millions of Americans are facing.

No, I don’t believe the senators looked at this with an unbiased mind and came to this conclusion on their own volition. Much rather, they rely on some funding for their campaigning, and said funding had a deep influence on their decision. Not rational thinking.

[outsidetheparty]

I mean… yes? I thought this was common knowledge; there’s certainly no shortage of documentation available: the ROI from lobbying efforts is insanely high, on the order of 75,000% by many estimates.

I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.

(Not so clear, personally, how you justify transposing this semiconductor handout to the more superficially defensible “national security”; but see also fossil fuel subsidies, corporate tax breaks, barring negotiated drug pricing: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/amazing-ro... )

As for “why is it so cheap”? I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.

It’s very low effort for a corporation to threaten to offshore and ask for a handout to not follow through on the threat. And it’s a very easy call for the politician to take the bribe, because then they can go back their constituency and say “We saved your jobs from going to China!” Everybody wins except the taxpayers. (And the corporations will go ahead and offshore, or not, just like they would have anyway, because one of the services they pay their lobbyists for is ensuring there will be no consequences for accepting the handout.)

[imtringued]

In an economic system where the rich earn money just from being rich, you have a strong incentive as a politician to sell your country as ten million dollars will result in a perpetual and exponentially growing income stream that exceeds a politicians salary multiple times and you don't even have to lift a finger, just do a single corruption stint and be locked in the upper class with the rest of the wealthy for the rest of your life.