Wednesday, June 08, 2011

Losses And Bailouts

Should taxpayers bail out farmers who experience losses when one of them fails to uphold safety/risk-based standards?

Should taxpayers bail out financial institutions that experience losses when one of them fails to uphold safety/risk-based standards?

Should taxpayers bail out employees who lose their jobs when businesses fail to uphold safety/risk-based standards?

Or should taxpayers let businesses and workers suffer losses?

Just mulling this over, in the wake of the European Unions's proposal to bail out farmers. I don't really know.

E.coli: Concern Grows Over Lack Of Answers, Compensation Packaged Rejected, Food Production Daily, June 8 2011
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Update: Bill Marler just put a dollar figure on the cost of damage and human suffering wrought by Germany's E. coli outbreak: $2.84 billion. That doesn't include bailout funds to farmers which are running about 400 million euros (584 million dollars). That puts the EU's cost right now at about $3.4 billion.

Who pays? If taxpayers were assessed, say, several hundred dollars each to cover this cost, do you think there would be more stringent food safety regulations? (If taxpayers were assessed a yearly cost to support war, maybe there would be fewer wars.)

Taxpayers end up paying anyway, there just isn't an accounting for it in a place we'd notice, like our tax returns.
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3 comments:

Claudia said...

You would think if you bail out businesses it would trickle down to workers and they wouldn't lose their jobs.

Bix said...

I heard on BBC today that there are a number of farm workers in Spain out of a job right now, and out of a wage, yet their former employers are getting reimbursed.

Angela and Melinda said...

It NEVER trickles down,in any situation--that's a bogus theory invented by 19th-century capitalists to support their greed and has continued to be used that way by today's uber-capitalists.