In 2006 the federal government spent $92 billion in direct and indirect subsidies to businesses and private-sector corporate entities like Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and many others. They’ve only gotten more in the last seven years.
This kind of corporate welfare is defined by the Cato Institute as “any federal spending program that provides payments or unique benefits and advantages to specific companies or industries.”
Wal-Mart Corporation is at the top of the list of corporate welfare recipients, receiving an estimated $1 billion in state and local government subsidies.
In addition to subsidies, corporations take advantage of tax breaks that reduce their 35% tax rate down to an average of 13%, with giants like Exxon Mobile manipulating laws that leave them with zero taxes to pay.
Wall Street hedge fund managers get public assistance as well because of current law (thanks to the Bush II administration) that allows them to pay a 15% rate on their earnings, while the people whose money these hedge fund managers are investing have to pay a 35% rate.
I know it doesn’t sound real, but there actually is a special subsidy for corporate jets that cost taxpayers $3 billion annually; a tax deduction for second homes that costs us $8 billion a year; and annual taxpayer-funded subsidies to billionaire (yes, “billionaire”) farmers.
In the face of these corporate welfare facts we still have right wing critics like Charles Krauthammer getting on Fix News and criticizing poor people who he says want “to feed off the public teet,” and conservatives in Congress who are insisting the farm bill that will keep paying subsidies to billionaire farmers must include cuts in the food stamp program.
At the same time they call efforts to reform corporate welfare “tax increases” and “job killers.”
It is this kind of hypocrisy that makes the war being waged on the poor so detestable.
This war is not about government overreach, government undermining personal responsibility and initiative, or government spending. It’s about supporting and justifying the power of corporate money to lobby and make political payoffs. It’s about the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling doing its dirty work on behalf of the rich.
Poor don’t have well funded lobbyists to make their case. They hardly have a voice at all. When they do it is often that of a dedicated volunteer or a paid staff member of an advocacy organization who is receiving a very modest salary.
The goal of those who give the poor a voice is to persuade enough sensible leaders to stop long enough to realize that people needing public assistance are not a whipping post or a political football. They are our brothers and sisters who just want a chance to make a life for themselves.
If someday they do win over enough of our political leaders they just might join together to do something about the growing economic inequality in our nation that would be sensible, just, and effective.
All it would take is a measure of moral and political will.
This much is for sure. Helping the poor will never do harm to our nation’s moral character, but disparaging them while the rich get richer at their expense only undermines efforts to make us a more just society.
