Last November, California voters rejected Proposition 7, which would have given big tax breaks to many corporations as an inducement to cut air pollution.  In the voter pamphlet, opponents criticized the measure as "corporate welfare," saying we shouldn't pay these companies to do what they should do or are legally required to do already.
         Proposition 7 is history, but increasing use of concepts like "corporate welfare" or "welfare for the rich" shows a major leap in public awareness.  Words and thought are tightly interwoven.  The phrase "corporate welfare" was rarely heard 20 years ago, and consequently many people could but dimly conceive of the reality behind it.  But corporate welfare did exist and does exist; our expanded concepts enable us to see it more clearly now.
         I'm 41, and grew up hearing my elders' bitter complaints about "welfare cheaters" ripping off honest taxpayers.  Ronald Reagan crafted images of welfare mothers (mostly black) having more babies so they could increase their government checks while driving Cadillacs.
         There have certainly been many problems and much fraud within the "welfare for the poor" system, but there are potentially many more taxpayer dollars that can be saved by cutting corporate welfare.  Our representatives will need lots of encouragement and support in this, because many companies that feed at the public trough also make large campaign contributions.
         Remember the Savings and Loan scandal?  We don't hear much about it these days, but we're still paying for it, and will until 2019--when we will have paid off (with interest) the $157 billion bailout the government financed by selling 30-year Treasury Bonds.
         What happened?  In the early 1980s, the S & Ls were "deregulated," allowing them to forego their previous focus on conservative home mortgages and to instead
gamble with their depositors' money in highly speculative ventures.  Many wheeler-dealers got ridiculously rich.  The depositors' money was, of course, insured--by us, the taxpayers.  When the risky investments failed, we were left holding the bag.
         Much military spending is, in effect, welfare for high-tech industry.  These
payments are deeply entrenched, and thus the "peace dividend" we anticipated with the fall of the Soviet Union has barely materialized.  There are even cases where the Pentagon itself didn't want a weapons system (such as a type of plane or submarine), but Congress went ahead and spent the money for it anyway.
         The Communications Act of 1934 said that "the airwaves belong to the people,"  but little revenue has accrued to the Treasury from licensing our radio and television frequencies, which have been a phenomenal engine for generating enormous profits.
         Cattle ranchers holding valuable permits graze their animals on public land for
much less than it costs on comparable private land.  With this "welfare ranching," we subsidize meat production, while the animals often cause severe damage to our forest service or BLM land.  Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt tried to increase grazing fees in the early Clinton years, but was stymied by a powerful bloc of western senators.
         The US Forest Service has 8 times the road mileage as the interstate highway
system; many of these roads are carved out and maintained at public expense to enable the sale of taxpayer-owned timber at bargain prices.  A recent lawsuit filed by environmental, hunting, fishing, and recreation groups seeks a moratorium on all logging of forest service land until the government can prove that the logging program makes economic sense for the landowners (us).
         The antiquated Mining Law of 1872 has enabled corporations to mine hundreds of billions of dollars worth of minerals from our public lands while paying virtually nothing into public coffers.
         I recently read Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, which is a spellbinding history of the development and manipulation of water resources in the American West:  dams, canals, irrigation, hydroelectric power, the allocation of the Colorado River, the "water wars" of early Los Angeles, the ongoing "mining" of ground water in the Great Plains, and many other powerful stories are documented.  Throughout this history, public funding with private profit has been the norm.  One story particularly exposes the ludicrous extent of our corporate welfare system:
         For thousands of years, much of the southern Sierras drained into Tulare Lake, a huge (Lake Tahoe size), shallow, seasonal body of water that would swell each spring with snowmelt and dry up by the fall.  The lake and fluctuating wetlands were habitat for millions of migrating birds and waterfowl.  After World War II, the US government dammed the rivers feeding Tulare Lake and built dikes around the former lake basin, at public expense.  Huge agribusiness landholders were then sold irrigation water at ridiculously low prices and began farming the former lakebed, mostly with cotton.  A 1983 El Nino brought heavy precipitation; with the spring melt, the already full dams were dumping torrents of water.  Nearby towns began to flood.  The Army Corps of Engineers spent $2.7 million building emergency levees around the towns, although a simple breach in one of the dikes surrounding the ancient lakebed would have enabled the water to find its historic home.  But the growers wouldn't agree to this, so we coughed up millions to protect the towns.  At the same time, the growers were being paid separately by the government not to grow cotton, because there was a crop surplus at the time.
         This story illustrates a basic pattern in our society:  public giveaways, private
profit.  The giveaways can be direct subsidies, but are more often hidden in the form of tax credits and deductions.  It is time to hold our government and business leaders responsible, and to end these taxpayer rip-offs.  Write a letter, make noise!  Read between the lines in articles and news reports; you'll find that the welfare state is very much alive and attuned to the desires of powerful corporations.
 
 

            Several of the links at the ends of the articles Taking Responsibility and Food for Thought are also very relevant to the issue of corporate welfare.