Jon Stewart was left bleeding after slicing his hand open on-air Monday while delivering an impassioned monologue on the federal corporate subsidies that appear to be untouched amid the Trump administration’s indiscriminate cuts to civil service agencies.
Whipping out his “wannabe accountant starter kit” — a banker’s desk lamp, old-fashioned calculator and mug emblazoned with the words “World’s Most Dad” — “The Daily Show” host saved “billions of dollars in 11 seconds” in highlighting the conglomerates that receive taxpayer-funded subsidies, including fossil fuel companies, major retailers and pharmaceutical companies.
He noted that such huge handouts are not being touched by billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, even as the faux-agency boasts huge savings that actually have not come to pass.
“Pharmaceutical companies get everything from our government: tax breaks, research grants, patent extensions — worth billions of dollars,” he said. “And what do we the people get for it? The highest drug prices in the western hemisphere.”
Expressing comedically over-the-top frustration at “the money our free-market-ish system uses to prop up corporate profit at the expense of the taxpayer,” Stewart shattered the mug on his desktop, embedding a chunk of it between his right thumb and forefinger.
He shook off the shards, looked down with a grimace and hid his hand under the desk, quipping, “I’ll be going to the hospital soon.”
But Stewart didn’t miss a beat, continuing to point out the irony of subsidies for wildly profitable companies whose workers don’t earn enough to live on.
His injured hand made one last appearance as he later brought it out from behind the desk, clutching a blood-soaked tissue, to exhort the Democratic Party to do more to highlight those disparities.
“We are subsidizing the very system that makes workers’ lives harder in the first place,” Stewart said. “The government’s role should be to end the corruption that enables that exploitation.”