No More Corporate Welfare! (Congress Keeps The Fiscal Sleaze In "Fiscal Responsibility")
Sheldon Richman writes at reason:
When Congress and President Obama came up with their beyond-the-last-minute deal to put off addressing the coming fiscal crisis, The Wall Street Journal turned the spotlight on a little-noticed, yet too typical aspect of Washington's machinations: "The bill's seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout," the Journal reported.So a bill that was represented as the first steps toward fiscal responsibility (try not to laugh too hard) contained billions of dollars in corporate welfare. And it was a bipartisan affair.
How sad. How Washington!
Beneficiaries of the various special tax treatments and exceptions includes owners of NASCAR speedways, companies in American Samoa, rum producers, businesses on Indian reservations, railroads, Hollywood moviemakers, and green-energy firms, including wind-power equipment producers.
As the Journal commented, "The great joke here is that Washington pretends to want to pass 'comprehensive tax reform,' even as each year it adds more tax giveaways that distort the tax code and keep tax rates higher than they have to be."
Read the whole piece. He explains very well how this rigging of the market hurts consumers and violates equal protection under the law.
Corporate welfare from Congress is a sneaky form of theft without a clearcut victim but plenty of profits for those who hire the right lobbying firms.
And remember that Sandy relief spending bill of $51 billion? yeah, that was laden with special interest pork that had nothing to do with helping the areas affected by Sandy.
But if you voted against it you hated the people affected by Sandy.
I R A Darth Aggie at January 23, 2013 5:55 AM
We've crossed a threshold with this sort of thing, where the rate of return from investing in lobbying is now far higher than the rate of return from investing in marketing, product development, or distribution. From here, there's only one solution -- a Constitutional amendment that reads like so:
"The U.S. government may not transfer money to any other entity, public or private, except in exchange for goods received or services rendered. Any such transfers must be representative of the fair market value of such goods or services."
Cousin Dave at January 23, 2013 6:55 AM
I still want an amendment that requires any law be tied to the the power listed in the U.S. Constitution.
Jim P. at January 23, 2013 8:56 PM
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