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