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Comment by yyyfb | Hacker News Reader

Why, would US govt run it any better?! If you think financial types can't run an engineering and manufacturing business, wait until you see the politicians try.

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Read the article. It proposes breaking it up into competitive firms, not having the government run it.

Its premise is actually that it’s essentially a government run entity now, and that’s what needs to change.

You trust the gov to run the military, which is literally essential to the nation's survival, so why not?

Gp made a bait and switch, equating government ownership with Congress in the board room. The implication doesn't ring true

The military is not a business. It doesn’t have a revenue model that tries to maintain solvency.

Given large companies get bailouts whenever they need them, I would argue the same is true of many companies in the US.

Name the last large company to receive a bailout. This question is important to see where you draw the line on something being a “bailout.”

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

991 times for a total of $635B

This list includes companies that received <$10,000 (and which was paid back entirely, for example the one below). It sounds like any amount of money from the government is a bailout by your metric. Or perhaps your definition is more narrow since the list only includes financial institutions and automakers, so maybe it's only banks or automakers that receive money from the government? To be less charitable, I'm pretty sure you're just reciting some stupid Twitter/Reddit talking point that you agree with and that you have no principled stance on this beyond "Arghhhhh I hate big corps! The system sucks! Corporations privatize profits and socialize losses!"

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/entities/927-east-en...

It's interesting how quick you are to jump into an ad hominem attack, rather than discuss the topic at hand.

Please don't do that. It makes your argument look very weak, and it's not polite. We're here to have a discussion, not attack people.

First, don't tell others how to post. You're not the arbiter of discussions. Posts like yours are themselves ad hominem attacks and attempts to deflect from engaging substantively in the discussion by appealing to some moral high ground that you think you occupy. You are not your karma score.

Second, you can't even articulate what my argument is (how do I know that you can't even articulate what my argument is? because I haven't made one, all I've done is ask for more information about yours), so how can you call it weak?

Third, you still haven't answered my original question: what is the last company to receive a bailout under your definition? More broadly, you haven't articulated what a bailout even is. It's telling that you haven't: you're not interested in a discussion, you're interested in making a political statement.

Here's a full timeline of all bailouts listed by propublica:

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/main/timeline

which clearly shows this is the last company to receive a bailout (Harbor Bankshares Corporation)

https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/events/list/2022/8

A bailout is defined as

" We're tracking where taxpayer money has gone in the ongoing bailout of the financial system. Our database accounts for both the broader $700 billion bill and the separate bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

For each entity, we provide a “Net Outstanding” amount, which shows how deep taxpayers are in the hole after accounting for any revenue the government has received (usually through interest or dividends).

Companies that failed to repay the government and resulted in a loss are shaded red. You can see a list of those investments here. All other investments either returned a profit to the government or might still be repaid. Recipients of aid through TARP’s housing programs (such as mortgage servicers and state housing orgs) received subsidies that were never intended to be repaid, so we don’t mark those as losses.. "

So the lines marked in RED are where money was given to a private company and never repaid. That is an outstanding "loss" on a bailout.

So your definition of a bailout is "entities that received money under TARP plus Fannie and Freddie." This is a strange definition and it means that the last bailout that possibly could have happened was on October 3, 2010 per https://home.treasury.gov/data/troubled-asset-relief-program ("The authority to make new commitments through TARP ended October 3, 2010, at which time Treasury shifted focus to the orderly wind-down of TARP. As of September 30, 2023, all TARP programs have closed, and there are no remaining troubled assets held by OFS.").

Indeed, looking at what you believe to be the "last company to receive a bailout" we can see that they were bailed out in 2009. The August 2022 event that you believe to be a bailout is, as the description aptly notes, a "Partial Repayment" of their bailout from 2009.

To be honest, it seems like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Almost like you're just reciting some stupid Twitter/Reddit talking point that you agree with but don’t understand beyond "Arghhhhh I hate big corps! The system sucks! Corporations privatize profits and socialize losses!"

> To be honest, it seems like you have no idea what you’re talking about. Almost like you're just reciting some stupid Twitter/Reddit talking point that you agree with but don’t understand beyond "Arghhhhh I hate big corps! The system sucks! Corporations privatize profits and socialize losses!"

You said that already, verbatim.

Saying the same thing over and over does not help move the discussion forward, and is utterly pointless.

Do you want to have a discussion and exchange ideas, or just attack my ideas? So far you have shared none of your own ideas. Why is that?

Starting in 2008 GM were dispersed $50B dollars. As of today there is still $11.3B outstanding.

GM gross profit for the quarter ending September 30, 2023 was $5.356B (so roughly $20B a year). Do you not think GM should have to pay back some of that outstanding $11.3B ?

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GM/general-motors/...

You don't think American society would be better off if taxpayer money was used to benefit tax payers instead of private companies so they can pay their CEO $38.9 million dollars a year?

https://mywage.ca/salary/celebrity-salary/mary-barra

What is your definition of bailout? how does it differ from the site I linked? do you think they are not problematic? (if you share your thoughts and input I will learn something and be better educated as a result, rather than just continuing to attack me as a person.)

The US military isn't exactly the picture of efficiency. Let Boeing lose a trillion dollars every year and don't subject it to audits or any other oversight then yeah, I'm sure the government will run it great.

I’m not sure it you’re aware of the inefficiencies and corruption of the military, or the fact that - it’s a cost center. It’s also something we are able to spend unlimited funds on because it is existential. And privatizing the military would be a terrible idea.

We definitely can’t afford to operate other industries the way we operate the military, which consumes 15% of the annual budget.

Efficiency can be a problem in and of itself. Efficiency is a fine enough goal, though too often companies pursue it to the point that other important values like safety, resiliency, and long-term stability fall by the wayside. They'll also pursue efficiency by externalizing costs and risks to other parties. That's basically what you see in the rail shipping industry [1]. Companies will naturally pursue effiency. Nationalizing a company may be going too far, but we need something else (i.e., government) to pressure them to maintain other values too.

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-tra...

Trust by default. The difference is, I don't trust anyone else to run the military.

And the military is horribly inefficient. So why not privatize it? Because that would almost certainly lead to other, very bad, outcomes...

Military procurement in the US is already privatised in everything but name. The brass get a place at the top table in matters of national policy and critical event response, but procurement is essentially privatised, with an open door between senior military figures, politicians, senior contractors/consultants, and C-Suite.

Boeing is one the poster children for that. Costs would definitely be saved if there were more defence and aerospace bidders and engineering cultures, and Boeing couldn't rely on military pork to keeps its enshitified commercial arm in the air.

In fact if I were in some kind of gov procurement position I'd be looking very hard at the quality, costs, and reliability of Boeing's military projects right now.

Maybe that's the problem actually. We have to wait till Elon Musk turns his eye on the military and starts running it no matter what the states think of it.

Well there’s a nice horrifying thought on a Saturday morning :D

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