Could the government balance the budget by ending welfare?

Deja Q

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:15 PM
Original message

Could the government balance the budget by ending welfare?

You betcha!

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1554/is_n3_v21/ai_18008942

Oh dear. I said the "s" word. Subsidy. Corporate subsidy.

Excerpt:

How Congress pays industry - with federal tax dollars - to deplete and destroy the nation's natural resources.

Each time a fast-food customer picks up an order of fries, taxpayers pick up part of the tab. Food stamps? No, this is another kind of free lunch.

Eighty percent of the nation's fast-food fries are made from the Columbia River Basin Russett Burbank potato, which "makes a perfect frozen french fry but needs to grow in a desert with lots of water," explains one industry analyst.

Thanks to the Grand Coulee Dam, Washington state's Columbia Basin meets both poles of the oxymoron: It was a dust bowl before irrigation made it an agricultural powerhouse. Now potato processors sell 3 billion pounds of french fries each year to big retail chains, and everyone makes a tidy profit. Very tidy. One potato sorter, J.R. Simplot, parlayed the frozen french fry into a multibillion-dollar empire after meeting a hamburger-stand owner named Ray Kroc back in 1967.

But not everyone wins on this deal. The water that made the Columbia Basin bloom flows for a price, most of which the farmers, processors and retail chains don't pay. It's the American public that foots the bill for more than $3 billion in irrigation subsidies each year. Many of the water projects also threaten stocks of endangered salmon. The free lunch, it turns out, is not so free.
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The potato industry is just one beneficiary of corporate welfare, the estimated $104 billion the federal government spent last year on subsidies, giveaways and tax breaks for favored industries. And while the reform-minded Congress has aimed its budget-cutting axe at school lunches, public broadcasting and poor women with children, the vast array of government handouts to business remain virtually unscathed.

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Ignacio Upton

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:20 PM
Response to Original message

1. But but but...corporations need that money to innovate!

Edited on Thu Feb-01-07 04:20 PM by Ignacio Upton

Of course, the drug companies, auto companies, and the entertainment industry will try all sorts of things in the way of getting the government to squash competition for them (the RIAA-supported DRM technology that will become standard on Windows Vista is an example.) If we ran a truely free market, the government wouldn't keep enacting copyright laws like the DMCA, and they sure as hell wouldn't keep subsidizing oil and agribusiness (and that includes ethanol subsidies, as corn-based ethanol is NOT efficient.) And don't get started with drug company patents!

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Deja Q

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:28 PM
Response to Reply #1

4. That sounsd like Microsoft, who has innovated more from

Apple (who "innovated" just the same way from Xerox) and Linux, or even buying other companies outright than anything on their own. Their R&D isn't about quality and testing; it's about which acquisitions are seen as the most popular.

If we ran a truly free market, Gates would be starving on the sidewalk like too many Americans are.

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genie_weenie

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:23 PM
Response to Original message

2. Can we ever put enough constraints on

in order to keep Government and Corparations from working hand-in-hand? Captains of Industry, government "leaders" and the military are natural allies against the rest of society.

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emulatorloo

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:25 PM
Response to Original message

3. And while we're at it, have them end Warfare too. EOM

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Deja Q

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:32 PM
Response to Reply #3

6. Please spell it out for me...

Are you in support of government subsidy to big corporations, ballpark owners, and so on?

Small businesses need the money. Struggling ones do.

For example, McDonalds does not need $500,000 to advertise little fried chicken bits to the country of Turkey. http://www.poynter.org/article_feedback/article_feedback_list.asp?user=&id=106580 has more on that... How many Katrinians could be supported for a year merely by shifting all the corporate welfare (look up how McDonald's got $500,000 to advertise McNuggets in Turkey)?

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PsN2Wind

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Thu Feb-01-07 04:31 PM
Response to Original message

5. That portion of welfare going to the Pentagon should do it

After all, the Pentagon has had so much money shoveled into it for decades, that there are trillions it cannot account for. Trillions that we're paying interest on but have no idea where it went.

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