Longtime lurker, and observer:
Elon Musk made promises to my city and wildly under-delivered: Obligatory sorry for the format, on mobile, and sorry if this gets lost in the sauce.
I'm from Buffalo, NY (bringers of chicken wings and Starbucks Unionization) a rustbelt city who's glory days are in the past but still itching for a redemption story. Years ago, Musk made a deal with NY to build a production factory in buffalo for his Tesla Solar panels (Solar City). He said it would be like a Tesla Gigafactory for solar panels. The factory was supposed to create 1400 “well-paying,” “high-tech” jobs for the area. What we are left with is a factory that produces nothing and is unstable employment for a few hundred. This is endemic of all of these oligarchs (let's call them what they are) selling a bag of goods with no intention of delivering. NY put up over a billion dollars for the factory before a single panel was produced!! Conservatives will argue that this is how you generate business, because you have to help out “job creators.” Do none of them have a calculator?
Let's look at a billion dollars mathematically: 1 billion could have given 1400 people 714k plus salaries for a year. That buys a lot of Avocado Toast. Or 2800 people making 357k a yr. If I was given a billion dollars, I could create 10,000 jobs paying 100k a year? Road crews, teacher shortages, civil servant jobs whose returns on investment would be measurable. The greater Buffalo area has a population around 880k. How can you argue a billion is better in the hands of an oligarch, instead of 10,000. Workers will put the money back into the economy, through necessity, moving money around instead of stock buybacks, paying bullshit bonuses, or hoarding it like goddamn dragons. Money moving is better for the economy. It is the only way to see economic growth.
This is just a billion dollars allocated for one city, yet Musk, across his companies, has been given hundreds of billions of taxpayer money in subsidies. He hasn't created 10s of thousands of jobs with it, has he?
https://www.investigativepost.org/2023/01/11/teslas-solar-factory-in-buffalo-fizzles/
That's the point of taxes though, isn't it? “Provide for the common welfare.” Are we not supposed to benefit from our money? Instead, we're sold this story how we're welfare queens on the benevolent corporate dime if you need help. While these companies use subsidized dollars to socialize costs and privatize gains. Socialism for me, but not for thee. There are 2 classes of the population that are increasing: the billionaire class, and the homeless. You're out of your goddamn mind if you think the 2 aren't directly related.
So how do we fix it? Call out the “nobody wants to work anymore” crowd; we have a historic unemployment rate. We vote for people who support everyone paying their fair share of taxes, including income tax, windfall tax, marginal tax, capital gains tax, and inheritance taxes. We need student debt forgiveness, so graduates can contribute to the economy. We need term limits, and campaign finance reform, too. You know, all the stuff the everyday American supports, but the people responsible for changing the broken system, directly benefit from. They keep the shenanigans going bc lobbyists pay their reelection bids. We somehow, as a people, need to get our own lobbyists to create a PAC and fight for us. We can call it the “We're not gonna take it anymore PAC.” Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
I'm not writing this for the Karma. I just wanted to point out an example directly impacting my city that's indicative of a larger problem I'm sure many Americans are going through.