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