Image by William Banzai
zerohedge.com / By George Washington / 03/13/2013 17:55
In previous installments, we’ve noted that we could more than offset the need for the “sequestration” budget cuts by doing any one or combination of the following:
- Stopping the counter-productive quantitative easing by the Fed
Here’s another way to offset the need for budget cuts: cut off the welfare queens. (Jamie Dimon – shown above- and the other Wall Street queens are the largest recipients of welfare.)
Liberals and conservatives agree that we should stop subsidizing the fatcats. For example, the conservative Cato Institute points out that corporate welfare amounts to almost $100 billion per year. Cato notes:
Corporate welfare often subsidizes failing and mismanaged businesses and induces firms to spend more time on lobbying rather than on making better products. Instead of correcting market failures, federal subsidies misallocate resources and introduce government failures into the marketplace.
While corporate welfare may be popular with policymakers who want to aid home-state businesses, it undermines the broader economy and transfers wealth from average taxpaying households to favored firms. Corporate welfare also creates strong ties between politicians and business leaders, and these ties are often the source of corruption scandals in Washington. Americans are sick and tired of “crony capitalism,” and the way to solve the problem is to eliminate business subsidy programs.
Cato also notes:
The federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits …. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.
(Indeed, the Federal Reserve threw money at hedge funds, McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson, “several billionaires and tens of multi-millionaires”, including Christy Mack, the wife of Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, billionaire businessman H. Wayne Huizenga, and Michael Dell, co-founder of Dell Computer, hedge fund manager John Paulson and private equity honcho J. Christopher Flowers.)
