Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomasmeeks | Hacker News Reader

This country's willingness to dump massive entitlements on the coal, etc. industries while simultaneously deriding individual entitlements is the height of hypocrisy. Really makes me wonder what the breaking point is for this particular brand of cognitive dissonance. You'd think things like the recent Carrier factory shutdown would at least present a speed bump to this sort of thing.

View on HN

I'm guessing it's something like

individual entitlements: giving money to slackers, encouraging them to be lazy

entitlements on coal: helping hard working americans get/retain their jobs

not that i agree with this line of logic.

Oh yes, and what's more amazing is that it's about 60,000 coal miners whose jobs we're talking about.

That's fewer than Arby's. That's fewer than people who work in museums.

It's insanity.

Individual entitlements are a majority of federal spending. In comparison, government incentives for coal are almost non-existent. You seem to be off by at least 10,000%.

The funding model is completely different. Entitlement programs are funded by employers as a cost of doing business and taxpayers, and they’ve been providing intergovernmental loans for years to keep loan costs down. Meanwhile shoving billions to cover miner health programs and re-shore busted pension funds are paid by the taxpayer, who maybe gets lower coal energy costs, but probably not. That’s before we get into the uncalculated, externalized costs of coal on the environment.

Government incentives for coal are huge. It’s just that most of them take the form of allowing them to dump toxic waste without any consequences, so it doesn’t show up in the official budget.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com