Dear McWoodduck...
With these corporate well fare queens, we are actually talking about corporate entitlements_ _hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. And actually the reverse of so-called citizen entitlements which amount to a few billion dollars or so. Moreover, the corporate welfare state is bigger than ever and still growing; at the expense of common citizens. Lets look at just a few examples of corpo welfare queens of among hundreds , or thousands of cases.
ENERGY: more subsidization than ever. Currently about 40 million acres are leased to energy corps; and more than 40 million acres offshore are leased. These E-corps keep the lion's share of profits and We-the-People get gyped.
Leases can tie up land for as little as $5 dollars per acre! In 1996 government reduced royalties payed by Gulf Oil drillers to encourage drilling in an oil glut market, BUT never rescinded this royalty relief leading to hundreds of billions of windfall profits when the E monopoly raised fuel prices...that's corporate welfare!
Similar thing happened in TELECOM: Government gave away huge swaths of the digital spectrum literally worth hundreds of billions of dollars
MINING: same thing. The same 1872 law allows corps to mine on public lands for $5/acre, same today as then, BUT keep all the gold, silver, uranium, gas, and other resources. We-the-People get zilch even though metal prices soared for and benefitted those on the corporate welfare gravy train.
DIRECT SUBSIDIES: a perfect example is corporatized farms. Farmers despite record high food prices get around $5 billion\year in direct payments and crop insurance....a perfect example is the sugar and ethanol industries.
TAX CODE: currently domestic business gets $30 to $40 billion\year tax breaks. But add in state and local tax give aways and that $ figures swells to $100+ billion\year!! And all this adds to national instability as business vie for tax breaks and jump around from one state or another.
REGULATION and DE-REGULATION GAMING: good example is banking. The FDIC program encourages citizen deposits in banks as the governmnet allegedly promises to not allow bank failures, riiiight! This subsidy allows the banks to borrow at low cost and lend at 2x or 3x margin! Ethanol is another boondoggle. Regulations require blending in gas and this also raises food prices....corn acreage for ETOH is about 40%. Corn producers\ fuel producers than get a Ethanol Tax CREDIT! Niiice! Not only is the environment a looser, so are We-the-People on this one. There are thousands of regs like this on the books that spoon feed gravy to welfare queens.
But the biggest corpo welfare deal of all is COPYRIGHT and PATENT protection_ _literally worth hundreds and hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars!
Some of this protection is necessary of course; but these 'protection' laws now stymie development and free enterprise., especially in necessary energy fuel development. US 'protection' laws have been expanded 11 times since 1962!! The result is that corps are now more dependent on government then any 'earned income credit' family could be.
Romney may talk about small government for political rhetorical reasons; especially when it comes to directly helping citizens, but when it comes to helping his comrades in his sleeper cell of plutocrats_ _the bigger and all encompassing the better!! Closing these welfare cons will go along way to paying off debt instead of passing onto citizens; but I reckon the plundering will continue regardless who is in office, actually pick up under Romney and the Oligarchs....its how they roll.
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...TM7
There are differences between leasing the land and actually doing something on the land. Millions of acers care leased and as we all know fewer and fewer permits are issued to do something on the land like drill, log, or mine. And if a site is granted then many acers are needed to build logging roads to and from the site. Also the lower the cost to produce raw materials like mined, logged, or pumped items then prices are lower.
I do agree with you that price supports, payments not to produce agro products and tarrifs only hurt the consumer.
I still consider this the relm of big government and the demand economy Big government morons that are un-able to understand free markets and supply and demand and instead of allowing the market to dictate how much corn is grown. Clearly at some point if there are too many corn growers the price will fall and growers will volunteer to get out and grow somethng else.
And yes we some times need to let some companies fail. Those assests would be used to produce other goods more efficently
