Corporate Welfare: Where’s the Outrage

Big business often does not support open and free markets. Rather, they sometimes look for all-too-willing politicians to find public sector cash and other benefits to give their own company an unearned competitive advantage. Typically, medium & small business owners and America’s middle class are left to pay the price.

1. Agricultural subsidies: often benefiting enormous agribusinesses and their lobbies at the expense of independent farmers. Many of the subsidized agribusinesses are not even American owned companies!
2. Tax Increment Financing: tax money intended to help economically challenged neighborhoods is often given to politically connected contractors who are building in already well-off neighborhoods.
3. Local tax breaks as incentives for large franchises: announced as a means of bringing jobs and economic growth to a community, the results are often much less than promised, with harmful consequences to the small local businesses already in existence.
4. 2008 Financial Crash: allowed the government to choose which companies were “too big to fail” and which companies to let crumble.
5. Institutionalized property tax exemptions: the world’s wealthiest petro-chemical corporations receive billion dollar property tax exemptions in a region where those taxes are needed to fund some of the poorest and weakest schools in the nation.
6. Trucking deregulation: A success story. After deregulation in 1980, the trucking industry today offers better and faster services for less cost. Thousands of independent owner-operators are now able to participate, bringing new life to a once stagnant, expensive and exclusive industry.