Republicans: “Buh, buh, Bob is brown!”

If a business constantly needs subsidies to stay afloat… Perhaps it should be a publically owned federal entity.

I used to work for a small software company in Louisiana. Part of our “business model” involved a $12 million per year bit of federal government pork that was granted to an organization that had a fancy-sounding name but was administered by one of our employees who operated out of a closet-sized office in a different building. For some reason our company was not able to just pocket this money (which I’m sure would have been our preference), so instead the money (which was ostensibly meant for improving industrial processes in the state) was given to a large defense industry corporation - not in Louisiana - and in return we were given lucrative consulting contracts by this corporation. Somewhat hilariously, my company was never on the list of this corporation’s approved contractors but we got the gigs anyway, which always prompted the people we worked with to question what the hell we were doing there in the first place.

Naturally enough, the owners of my company were conservatives (who prayed to Jesus to end company-wide meetings) who liked to rant about the “welfare queens” destroying this country.

I’ve tried shutting up about Bob, believe me!

Subsidies for fossil fuels need to go, but this isn’t exactly a fair comparison. How many people get $1500? You gotta at least compare total values.