Comment by cogman10
And continues to make. The NHS, for example, is a major source of funding for research into new drugs and treatments. mRNA vaccines came from decades of NHS funded research that the manufacturers are just now picking up and running with.
It should also be pointed out that economic goodness is not and should not be the be-all end-all reason for government spending. Governments building parks, for example, is a social good with little economic value (or at very least hard to quantify benefits).
In the case of things like medicine, government spending there has a social good of limiting communicable disease which is more important than how much money a drug company can make off a drug.
For something like TSMC putting plants in the US, even if it's somewhat economically disadvantageous we are still talking about bringing onshore more jobs and training for US citizens which will generally increase our capabilities here and the satisfaction of those employees.
Trying to get onshore development of electronics, the government basically has 2 levers to pull, either subsidizing building new manufacturing or applying tariffs to incoming tech goods. One of those levers has the negative consequence of raising prices on tech goods for everyone while we wait for manufacturing to build out.
> the government basically has 2 levers to pull
That’s simplistic and assumes a baseline where the relationship with the government starts at zero.
The company pays taxes. There can be negotiations over the tax rate, which is not a subsidy so much as a ‘tax you less’ type arrangement. This can happen at multiple levels for a company like Apple, even beyond the state/federal thing. The repatriation of billions of dollars of earnings is also in play.