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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (287384)	5/9/2006 7:58:55 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1574045

Special interest come in all different forms. If they are going to be effective they are going to have to be concerned about money, because it takes money to be effective, but they don't have to be about corporate profits, see for example environmental groups or both sides of many political debates (NRA vs groups supporting gun control for example). (Edit - Groups like the NRA, Green Peace etc. might have an easier time claiming that they are trying to help the general good, so you could reasonbly not consider them special interests. Many people might consider the groups they oppose to be special interests and the groups they support to not be special interests but I think they should all be considered in or out of that category) It hurts AMD and it huts you and me. Every tax subsidy has a winner and multiple losers. My example was an import barrier not a tax subsidy, but I agree with the overall idea. Subsides, import barriers, highly targeted tax breaks all hurt others. They cause taxes on other people or corporations to be higher, and they distort the economy reducing economic efficiency and growth. Barriers hurt AMD to the extent they hurt the whole economy, but not in a way that AMD would really notice. The hurt is also not noticed by most individuals. That part of the problem with special interests. Hurt everyone by $5 a year and they probably won't notice, while the guy getting the $5 a year from each of many millions of taxpayers, is going to fight pretty hard not to lose it. If they think subsidizing oil companies to increase the natural rate of consumption, when we are already using 25% of the worlds oil consumptions is smart, then they need to be replaced. I think they might believe that finding more non-OPEC oil would be good, but I can't really be sure what they think. I don't support the subsidies. I'm not even going to assert that they clearly aren't a case of trying to help a special interest. It very well might be the case that its all about supporting the oil companies and their desires. My point was more general and not really about the oil companies. The point was it can be hard to disentangle the reasons behind supporting such things. It can be purely a special interest benefit, or it might be due to a distorted and inaccurate picture of the general interest. Probably a bit of both. Either way I oppose most subsidies. Tim