This past winter, Frank Nicastro, an obscure Connecticut legislator, offered a bill to bail out a newspaper in New England. At the time, I said that it was better if we just let it die. According to this article, President Obama is warming to the idea:

The president said he is “happy to look at” bills before Congress that would give struggling news organizations tax breaks if they were to restructure as nonprofit businesses.

“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

My initial reaction is to question why we’d want to throw money at dinosaurs that going extinct because their main goal appears to be to protect President Obama and the Democrats than it is about reporting the news whatever the news happens to be.

For someone who’s supposedly committed to cutting the deficit in half, this seems like a good way of increasing the annual deficits. Ideally, when a tax cut is proposed, the industry that gets the tax cuts have a chance of turning their company around. These tax cuts likely wouldn’t change the industry a bit. They’d likely just pad the publishers’ wallets.

I said months ago that people whined about Montgomery Wards going out of the catalog sales business. They whined, too, when IBM’s share of the market changed, too, and they started offering early retirement packages. The people who whined didn’t talk about this tiny company in Texas named Dell that was just emerging. They didn’t applaud a little company named Walmart that took Sears’ and Montgomery Ward’s niche.

Newspapers as they’re currently configured will be extinct within a decade. Why waste money on them?

Technorati: Bailouts, Newspapers, Ben Cardin, Barbara Mikulski, President Obama, Deficits, Fiscal Restraint, Democrats, Walmart, Dell, Montgomery Ward, Sears, IBM

Cross-posted at California Conservative