Paul Ryan’s penance has not been matched by a broader effort to change the substance beneath the words. Ryan has long been the intellectual torchbearer of a public policy that would immediately hurt the same people he has decided to stop calling “takers.” For years, he has put forth a budget that would provide the largest tax cuts in history for the wealthy while gutting income support and health care assistance for the middle-class and poor.
Category: Income Inequality (Page 4 of 9)
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch on Sunday compared the efforts of his political network to the fight for civil rights and other “freedom movements,” part of a growing effort by the organization to emphasize its commitment to the plight of the disenfranchised.
During remarks to 450 wealthy conservatives assembled in the ballroom of a lavish oceanfront resort, Koch urged his fellow donors to follow the lead of figures such as Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Look at the American revolution, the anti-slavery movement, the women’s suffrage movement, the civil rights movement,” Koch said. “All of these struck a moral chord with the American people. They all sought to overcome an injustice. And we, too, are seeking to right injustices that are holding our country back.”
From a 4/26/15 lecture in Sperryville, Virginia, by Vernon Gras, Professor emeritus, English and Cultural Studies, Geroge Mason University.
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Subsidies considered excessive, unwarranted, wasteful, unfair, inefficient, or bought by lobbying are often called corporate welfare.[1] The label of corporate welfare is often used to decry projects advertised as benefiting the general welfare that spend a disproportionate amount of funds on large corporations, and often in noncompetitive, or anti-competitive ways. For instance, in the United States, agricultural subsidies are usually portrayed as helping honest, hardworking independent farmers stay afloat. However, the majority of income gained from commodity support programs actually goes to large agribusiness corporations such as Archer Daniels Midland, as they own a considerably larger percentage of production.[21]
Alan Peters and Peter Fisher (Associate Professors, Graduate Program in Urban and Regional Planning, University of Iowa)[22] have estimated that state and local governments provide $40–50 billion annually in economic development incentives,[23] which critics characterize as corporate welfare.[24]
Some economists consider the recent bank bailouts in the United States to be corporate welfare.[25][26] U.S. politicians have also contended that zero-interest loans from the Federal Reserve System to financial institutions during the global financial crisis were a hidden, backdoor form of corporate welfare.
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