Wooders said the purpose of subsidies should be to reduce the cost of new – rather than existing – energy sources: "You want renewable subsidies to reduce the cost of the technology, so you have better options going forward".
The purpose of subsidies is not to help already profitable businesses but to encourage the establishment of new sources of energy that, with the help of subsidies while they are still small and unprofitable, could grow to become viable alternative energy sources in the future.
But declaring China a market economy for the purposes of subsidies, and a non-market economy for the purposes of anti-dumping, is against WTO rules.Nobody in Congress, alas, seems to care about breaking WTO rules.
–What is the purpose of a subsidy?
"These trends have cast into sharp relief the questions concerning the public purpose" of the subsidy, Ms. Rivlin wrote at the time.
She says it is a serious problem that most taxpayer-funded work in the arts "is really done by and for white, solvent, educated people – you've got to examine the purpose of public subsidy".
In her paper (which tends to use the word "culture" as a virtual synonym of "the arts"), Jowell notes that the original purpose of government arts subsidy was essentially patrician: the defence of elite art forms against a rising tide of popular culture, a policy mitigated but not reversed in the 1960s and 70s.
Congress passed a child care program in 1990, distributing grants to states for the purpose of offering child care subsidies to low-income households.
In any case, if there is already some system in place to verify employers' reporting of earnings for tax purposes, that system may suffice for purposes of the wage subsidy.
In effect, it just extends to outside investors, for the purpose of acquiring toxic assets, the same subsidy that banks have been receiving since 1933.
