One particularly tough and indigestible nugget of talk-radio stupidity afflicting the guts of conservatism is the idea that there is some sort of fundamental difference between bribing a business with tax cuts and bribing it with a wheelbarrow full of cash. The Trump-Pence bailout of Carrier’s operations in Indiana provides an illustrative case... Republicans might have had a little bit of a point in the question of general tax cuts: A tax cut and spending are different things, even if the budgetary effects are exactly the same. But in the matter of industry-specific or firm-specific tax benefits of the sort...
