Wealthy corporations need public money because otherwise they’ll raise prices so high that it will collapse “the economy” and risk societal collapse. This is different from extortion because politicians make the laws and take a very small amount of this money for themselves.
“The economy” is the vampiric system where the people who do all the work get squeezed to death to make money for parasites who tell them “the economy” must be protected at all costs because reasons.
Everytime one hears a politician or media commentator harping about "the Economy growing" one should instantly ask "for whom?".
In fact, asking yourself "who is that really good for?" and "what's the point of telling me this?" is a pretty good general mental self-defense mechanism for handling the modern style of discourse from people trying to convince you to do something or form an opinion about them, using success stories - pretty much all such stories are self-serving in some way and generally either exagerated or lying by omission.
I used to work for a small software company in Louisiana. Part of our "business model" involved a $12 million per year bit of federal government pork that was granted to an organization that had a fancy-sounding name but was administered by one of our employees who operated out of a closet-sized office in a different building. For some reason our company was not able to just pocket this money (which I'm sure would have been our preference), so instead the money (which was ostensibly meant for improving industrial processes in the state) was given to a large defense industry corporation - not in Louisiana - and in return we were given lucrative consulting contracts by this corporation. Somewhat hilariously, my company was never on the list of this corporation's approved contractors but we got the gigs anyway, which always prompted the people we worked with to question what the hell we were doing there in the first place.
Naturally enough, the owners of my company were conservatives (who prayed to Jesus to end company-wide meetings) who liked to rant about the "welfare queens" destroying this country.