Wealthfare Wednesday: Thursday Edition

It's not Wednesday night anymore, but I woke up early from a nightmare with a giant bug, which I took to be a message from my subconscious that I should post some corporate welfare links. Here are a few:

Mother Jones chips in with a nifty report on what a trillion dollars in military procurement buys you these days. Hint: taxpayers may not have gotten their money's worth. Shocking, I know. Just for good measure, Winslow Wheeler of the invaluable Center for Defense Information helpfully lobs a few incendiaries in the direction of Leon Panetta.

Meanwhile, in nuclear subsidy news, Alternet informs us that the military has outsourced the cleanup of the notorious Hanford site to the leeches at Bechtel, who are doing a crappy job for some big paychecks.

And finally, it's amusing to note that when you Google "corporate welfare" + "banks," one of the front-page hits is an ad for Bank of America. I guess no publicity is bad publicity.

Wealthfare Wednesday - On a Wednesday

In our last "Wealthfare Wednesday," two Saturdays ago, we took a look at farm subsidies, with the news hook being Jeff Flake's committee committing to some cuts in direct payments. This led commentators on the left and the right to expect some such cuts to be forthcoming. This WaPo piece primed the pump, following a freshman Republican around as he attempted to talk some sense:

"If every single member of Congress came in and said, ‘I’m going to defend my turf,’ you’d have the same [debt problem] — and the people here, they get that.”

Well, if by "the people here," he meant House Republicans,  then, to paraphrase Albus Dumbledore, that was optimistic to the point of foolishness.

Wealthfare Wednesday, Give or Take

This week's topic is farm subsidies. The 2004 edition of Take the Rich Off Welfare identified over $30 billion in annual handouts to agribusiness (a figure that includes price supports, ethanol handouts and water subsidies). In these lean budgetary times, pressure to trim these subsidies has been... pretty mild, so far. But there has been some movement.

Last week a House committee was pretty proud of themselves for voting to cut direct payments to farmers who make over a quarter million bucks a year. That would be Jeff Flake's Appropriations Committee. This puts them on record as agreeing with President Obama, who made such a proposal earlier this year. This also puts them at odds with their own party's Agriculture Committee. According to them, it would be a much better idea to cut funding for...food stamp recipients. Who do you think will win this battle of ideas in today's GOP?

The system of direct payments, which go out whether you choose to farm your land or not, is a relatively recent development. It's a legacy, not of FDR's New Deal, but of Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution. The Environmental Working Group has a suite of pages on farm subsidies, and explains direct payments in their handy primer. As they point out, this program alone costs about $5 billion a year, and also has the perverse effect of inflating land prices. Matthew Yglesias hones in on this, noting that some 45% of agricultural land is not owned by the farmer. Inflated land prices benefit the landowners instead, making them "a highly regressive transfer."

The Washington Post put a team of reporters on the aggie welfare beat over the past year and links up to the results at this page. NYT food columnist Mark Bittman offered up a post full of links on his blog. Bittman also offers a contrarian view with ""Don's End Agricultural Subsidies, Fix Them." He argues that we've been subsidizing unhealthy food policy for so long, that some funding in the other direction would help undo the damage.

The Center for American Progress likewise looks to redirect some of the savings from their proposed cuts. Their report focuses only on the $5 billion direct payment system. They identify $35 billion in savings by FY 2020, and suggest that $650 million of that could be redirected into "existing rural-based programs to provide incentives for renewable clean energy, energy efficiency, and advanced dedicated biomass energy crops."

Worthy goals, but something tells me that if our nation's dedicated public servants do come up with some ag policy cuts in their looming budget deal, they won't be looking to "reinvest" them anytime soon.

Anyway, enjoy your "Wednesday." If this keeps up, I'll change the name of the feature to "Subsidy Saturdays."

Wealthfare Wednesdays

Alright, I know it's Saturday; here's the deal:

Early on I mentioned that I would post a roundup of links on corporate welfare from time to time. But except for one brief post, I never got around to doing that. So let me try it this way: every Thursday morning I'll start a "Wealthfare Wednesday" draft post, and add links throughout the week as I stumble across items during my periods of intense study of the Internet. Then I can hit "publish" the following Wednesday, and let you keep up to date with all the ways your tax money is being handed over to the overprivileged.

But after grazing through my browser history, I've got more than enough links to post. So I'll just start a new draft for next Wednesday. Ready?

So, for instance, this Daily Kos diary summarizes a proposal from the Job Party identifying two trillion in  savings (over ten years) from cutting corporate welfare. That's about $200 billion a year, which is a nice start. About a quarter of their total comes from modest cuts to the Pentagon budget.

Helpfully, AlterNet's Joshua Holland, combing a report from the National Priorities Project, offers us "Five Eye-Opening Facts About Our Bloated Post-9/11 'Defense' Spending."

When you click on that same NPP report, their bottom line is that when you combine the separate budget lines of "defense" and "homeland security," you find that since 9/11 we've spent $7.6 trillion. The DHS part has gone from $16 billion in 2001 to $69 billion in 2011 – a 300% increase, in contrast to DoD's more modest 43% hike.

Senator John Tester took a stab at urging sanity, in an open letter suggesting we could maybe afford to shut down a few military bases here and there. Response: crickets chirping.

Along those lines, David Swanson had some fun batting around the NYT's feeble attempts to take heaping teaspoonfuls out of the military budget ocean. At the same time, WaPo looks at $32 billion squandered on weapons systems that were eventually cancelled. 

To their credit, though, the Times likewise swatted down GOP claims that eliminating fossil fuel subsidies would spike gas prices. 

Here's a useful link to the Real Cost of Prisons Project.

Also on AlterNet, Alison Kilkenny highlights  "4 Fantastically Stupid Projects Pushed By Republicans Aiming to Please Their Corporate Masters." If you're in a hurry, this includes KY's biblical theme park, TX's tax breaks for yachts, NJ's mega-mall boondoggle, and various state subsidies for union-busters.

Last month the redoubtable David Cay Johnston served up a dose of data to coincide with Tax Day: "Tax facts: The truth about who pays and who doesn't in America's bracket racket." Be sure and take your blood pressure meds.

1996: Corporate Welfare and "Nixon"

Fifteen years later, and deja vu: we've got divided government, a budget impasse, a potential government shutdown, and corporate welfare is still off the table. What we don't have is a new Oliver Stone movie to argue about - but maybe he could do a Newt Gingrich biopic with John Goodman in the title role. Steve Martin? Suggestions, anyone?

Same as last month, at this writing there is no budget deal in Washington. As this issue goes to press, the president is about to sit down again with Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich to try and hash things out. They could reach a compromise, or the whole thing might break down in recriminations once again. By the time this issue starts hitting the streets it should be clear one way or another.

I'm happy to have been proven wrong in my prediction that the president would cave in eventually. Still, compromise is his specialty, and it ain't over til it's over. What I should have said is that even if the president gets his way, and the GOP caves in, it's likely to be a fairly nasty budget. Mr. Clinton is standing firm against the most egregious examples of the Republicans' Robin-Hood-in-reverse plans, but neither side is talking much about the major chunk of our annual deficits: welfare for the rich.

Last spring the Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, gave a speech in which he identified $187 billion in annual spending which subsidizes the wealthy and large corporations. The rest of the Clinton White House, led by Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, quickly distanced themselves from Reich's remarks. Perhaps they're afraid of the effect on campaign contributions if any serious moves to derail this gravy train are contemplated. Doubtless that accounts for the GOP's failure to follow through on some half-hearted rhetoric along these lines from the irrepressible Senator Gramm.

But over the seven years the Congress and the White House are haggling over (assuming, of course, that no recessions or wars interfere with their best-laid plans), there is some $2.5 trillion in welfare for the rich, according to the group Citizens for Tax Justice.

Very little of this booty is on the table in the current negotiations, which makes them even more of a farce than they would be with the CBO projections both sides have agreed to.

To their credit, the Clintonistas have proposed some modest reductions in corporate welfare in their latest plan, but the sheer amount of this largess is simply staggering. Keep in mind that welfare for the rich is currently running at two to three times the amount spent on the poor, depending on how you define your terms. I rather doubt that the negotiations taking place as this ink hits this paper will do anything to fundamentally change that.

I should probably say a few words about Oliver Stone's Nixon while I'm at it, since I've spent many years studying the nefarious career of our 37th president. It's been amusing to watch the corporate media pundits fall all over each other in their haste to condemn Stone's radical notions. They're shocked, shocked, that anyone would dare suggest that Nixon was in any way complicit in assassinations. Dangerous paranoia, they snort.

Excuse me, but does that really seem so out of character for our Nixon? The guy who gave us the 1972 Christmas bombings? The pundits harrumph that no evidence exists to tie Nixon to the assassination plot against Castro. They fail to mention which one, since there were over 2 dozen US-sponsored snuff attempts on the old boy, from the Eisenhower administration to the Reagan years.

More to the point, during those same Eisenhower years, Vice-President Nixon, in bed with the Mob from the very start of his career, was the White House action officer for the planned Bay of Pigs invasion that JFK inherited. If historians expect to find Nixon's signature on a death warrant, that may be a tough standard of proof to meet, but our boy Tricky was certainly in the thick of it.

Even more to the point, there is eyewitness testimony that Nixon was present at a 1954 meeting in which the assassination of the President of Panama was contemplated, a killing which did indeed take place. And during Nixon's presidency, General Schneider of Chile was assassinated in a CIA-inspired plot. The reign of terror unleashed on that country at Nixon's orders is certainly proof of a homicidal temperament, whether or not he made like Brando in the Godfather. So spare me any outrage at Stone's supposed smear of our late elder statesman. Some of us still remember that look in his eyes.

It's a Stretch

This morning's paper brings three updates to this link, offered two posts below. The bottom line is, if you're not willing to touch Medicare growth, corporate welfare, tax increases and (not and/or!) the Pentagon budget, you're not serious about the deficit. Both Obama and the GOP are dancing around these plain truths in their budget proposals. Given the incentives in our political system, they can hardly behave otherwise, but both sides have bases that were expecting something different.

Meanwhile, as I expected in my previous, the Pentagon will only stand for so much when it comes to trimming their fat. Good thing we're not dominated by a powerful, entrenched military establishment like those poor Egyptians!

Finally, the odious George Will takes a break from his elite version of Michael Savage's schtick to make some sense for a change: The Pentagon can't even produce auditable budgets in compliance with the law (not to mention the good old Constitution). His conclusion is, so how can we even know what to cut? Well, aside from bloated, outdated weapons systems and a broken contracting process, let me offer two words: imperial overstretch.

Excuse me, but

File this one under "I'll believe it when I see it."

1999: Save Social Security

Just listened to the Diane Rehm show on my car radio, and the consensus view was that our current budget problems are best dealt with by modifying a social insurance program that is solvent for another 30 years or so. It's infuriating the way Beltway pundits lump Social Security in with "the entitlements problem" and generally ignore the huge cost savings to be realized in Medicare reform. Specifically, a public option, as in "Medicare for all" would save huge amounts of money. But either way, we have an aging population, and we will need more revenue to pay for it. Obsessing on benefit cuts, while the income cap on payroll taxes exempts the wealthy from paying the same as everyone else, is the height of myopia. Here's the view from twelve years ago:

Even though it's just a few weeks, doesn't it seem like the whole impeachment trial was a long, long time ago? One of the persistent rumors in Washington was that the big money guys were urging the GOP to acquit the President so that he'd be around to help "reform" Social Security.
Last week the President stopped off here in Tucson to explain just how he intends to do that. The good news is, it could have been a lot worse. Clinton has been flirting with various "privatization" plans, but had to back way off in the face of opposition from labor unions and the AARP. The bad news is, with the GOP still running Congress and the Great Compromiser back in the saddle, the final product could still end up pretty bad.

We have been the targets of several years of unrelenting propaganda from right-wing think tanks aimed at convincing us that the Social Security system is in crisis. These efforts have been largely successful, especially amongst many young people, who are convinced that there will be no money left when it's time for them to retire. This is absolutely not true.

Updates to TROW

People occasionally ask if there will be another update to Take the Rich Off Welfare.

The short answer to that is: maybe someday. The medium length answer is: not soon, but there will be a new edition of The CIA's Greatest Hits this year.

The longer version involves noting that the 1996 and 2004 editions of TROW were both produced at a time when I was working as my own boss, freelancing my work. The first edition was written before I had children, and while both were exhaustive efforts (both books, I mean), producing the update, without a co-author or assistant, while raising kids, was a daunting task.

Since I was laid off from my teaching job last May (thanks, Arizona legislature!). I've been getting by on unemployment checks since then, or at least what's left after taxes (thanks, Ronald Reagan!). And I try to generate income through a combination of substitute teaching, technical illustration, and bartending - though anything I make is deducted from the unemployment check.

Should I secure a permanent position again, undertaking a revision of TROW would require more time than I would have available. The only way to do it justice would be to secure grant money, institutional support, or a sizeable advance – that is, more sizeable than any publisher interested in the work is likely to afford.

In the meantime, though, what I can do is use this blog to link to any articles or discussions I can find on the relevant topics.

Recently, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake posted a discussion of the military budget, a brobdingnagian topic I tried to masticate in Chapter 11 of TROW. Quoth Jane:

The Defense Department’s annual budget is a phantom figure, falling far short of what we truly spend on defense. It doesn’t include either supplemental appropriations, or money allocated to defense by other departments.

The comments section appended thereto included a lot of useful links, as well.

Also, my favorite blogger, the preternaturally insightful Matthew Yglesias, weighed in on the topic of tax expenditures, which weaves throughout the various TROW chapters. Quoth Matt:

...the quick version is offered by Ezra Klein who says “What’s interesting about tax expenditures, I think, is that they’re basically the welfare state for the middle class, cleverly arranged such that they don’t look like the welfare state for the middle class.

I would say that what’s even more interesting about these tax expenditures is that they actually do much more to benefit the rich than to benefit the middle class.

I'll offer up links to such information whenever I can, and, time permitting, try to dig up some of my own.