Boeing (BA) Gets Hand-Outs From US Govt, According To Airbus

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 26, 8:13AM EDT

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All that work that Boeing (BA) gets to build military aircraft. It is really a disguised way to help the US company’s profits so that it can beat the daylights out of Airbus in the commercial aviation business. The same holds true for tax breaks that Boeing gets in places like Washington state so that it will build and expand factories.

According to Reuters, Airbus is arguing to the World Trade Organization that Boeing’s work for NASA and the Defense Department also saves it R&D money because the by-products of government work can be used to build commercial planes. "We will produce the cold facts to demonstrate subsidy by subsidy how U.S. subsidies have benefited Boeing and injured Airbus interests," an Airbus official told the news service.

Airbus and the European Union say unfair U.S. subsidies to Boeing over the past two decades and running to 2024 total $23.7 billion.

It is nice that Boeing gets all of that government work, but the real question is whether some other company could have gotten it just as well, if it had the capacity to give US agencies what they needed in terms of products.

Proving that the US favored one company that way could be very hard to prove.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.