Among the most outrageous expenditures is corporate welfare. Desperate businesses now overrun Washington, begging for alms. Believing that profits should be theirs while losses should be everyone else's, corporations have convinced policymakers to underwrite virtually every industry: agriculture, education, energy, housing, manufacturing, medicine, transportation, and much more.
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Cutting business subsidies would be a good start to balancing the budget. Moreover, going after corporate welfare is essential to create a budget package that the public will see as fair. Corporate welfare reflects politics at its worst.
For example:
The largest single source of business subsidies is the Department of Agriculture, with $25.1 billion. For the most part crop payments go to large farmers, who are big businessmen.
Bondow notes that -- notwithstanding mainstream Republican party rhetoric -- narrowly-drafted tax loopholes are a form of subsidy:
Spending is the most obvious but not only form of corporate welfare. Tax preferences, often called "tax expenditures," are the functional equivalent of direct outlays. Failing to tax is not the same as spending, since all income does not belong to the government. However, when the government provides a narrow exemption from general tax obligations it essentially is writing a check. While appropriations have some level of transparency, tax preferences often are obscurely drafted and dropped into larger bills, hidden from public view. Taxpayers then are unaware that they are being looted.
He also notes the hypocrisy of Republican politicians who talk about the free market, but enthusiastically dole out corporate pork:
The greater outrage is support for corporate welfare from the Right. Political conservatives wax poetic about the virtues of the free market, but conservative office-holders often are pro-business rather than pro-market.
Liberal writer Matt Stoller notes:
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