...even after years of effort to obtain funding when it actually was available explains a lot about the mentality that led to the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
What compels people to tell corporations that they can take all the profits from communities for the low price of creating jobs that often leave those same people unable to make ends meet and send them to a few at the very top without any requirement to put any of it back into the community?
Even worse, what compels people to actually give profitable corporations money to come there and exploit their workforce? And why has this become the standard?
Take SpaceX as an example:
Texas gave SpaceX--a company that made 8.2 billion dollars the previous year--$17.3 million " to help expand its Starlink manufacturing facility near Austin."
https://www.kut.org/business/2025-03-13/texas-grant-spacex-starlink-elon-musk-semiconductor-austin-bastrop
$17.3 million is 0.210976% of $8.2 billion. How much did that really help SpaceX? Why--in a normal world--would SpaceX or any other company pocket 0.2% of its annual revenue as a payoff from a community rather than saying, "you know what? We will expand here if you spend that on your community because we want to locate where people are happy and safe?"
Texas is also either home to or hosts the major operations of ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Chevron Corporation.
Based on their latest full-year results for 2024, the net incomes for ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Chevron Corporation:
ExxonMobil: $33.7 billion
ConocoPhillips: $9.22 billion, $9.24 billion
Phillips 66: $2.11 billion, $2.17 billion
Chevron Corporation: $17.661 billion
That's $74,101,000,000.00 in one year.
Reports say that there are nearly two-dozen camps scattered along the Guadalupe River valley.
In 2019, the city of Berkley was looking to install a siren warning system and cited a "siren proposal in Sonoma County was recently estimated at $850,000 for design and installation of 20 sirens."
https://newspack-berkeleyside-cityside.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-05-14-Item-27-Recommendation-to-Install-an-Outdoor.pdf
There is no way that every one of those camps would need anywhere near a 20-siren system, but let's say for argument that they did--and we will round it up to $1 million per system just to account for other expenses.
Two-dozen camps could be serviced by $24 million worth of equipment and installation. That's only $6.7 million more than Texas gave SpaceX. That is 0.032% of the $74.101 billion that just four oil companies made in 2024.
And despite all of that, the current death toll in Texas is over 100 with 160 still missing.
The One Big Beautiful Bill takes this same mentality and turns the volume up to eleven. Truly, It's such a fine line between stupid and clever....
= new reply since forum marked as read