United States | News & Politics

The CHIPS act was nerfed by lobbyists. It was supposed to ban companies from simply redirecting money overseas.

For instance, suppose Intel gets 8.5 billion in CHIPS act money that it's supposed to spend domestically. And suppose that in a given year they spend 10 billion dollars in the US and 30 billion dollars overseas. So they get the CHIPS act money and they spend 10 billion dollars in the US and 38.5 billion dollars overseas. That looks like they spent the CHIPS act money overseas, right? Nope, according to Intel's accountants, the CHIPS act money was spent domestically, but then Intel realized they had an extra 8.5 billion dollars and just went ahead and spent that other money overseas.

Like, the exact dollars they got, those they spend domestically, but then that "freed up" other dollars to spend overseas.

That these companies would do this was predicted and there were controls in the bill to prevent that, but the companies (Intel, IBM, etc) got all those controls stripped out of the bill.

Intel is run by the same MBA/Financier scum that destroyed Boeing. Their "leadership" is what caused the US to lose the industry we created in the first place. The idea that giving those scum billions of dollars would fix anything is a laugh. The CHIPS act should have began by nationalizing Intel, firing the entire executive suite along with all the MBAs and consultants at the company.