Corporate welfare

Corporate welfare is a phrase used to describe a government's bestowal of money grants, tax breaks, or other special favorable treatment for corporations. The definition of corporate welfare is sometimes restricted to direct government subsidies of major corporations, excluding tax loopholes and all manner of regulatory and trade decisions. The term "corporate welfare" was reportedly coined in 1956 by Ralph Nader. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor Believed to have been first popularised by Michael Harrington's 1962 book The Other America in which Harrington cited Charles Abrams, a noted authority on housing. Variations on this adage have been used in criticisms of the United States' economic policy by Joe Biden, Martin Luther King Jr., Gore Vidal, Joseph P. Kennedy II, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dean Baker, Noam Chomsky, Robert Reich, John Pilger, Bernie Sanders, and Yanis Varoufakis. "Privatizing profits and socializing losses" refers to the idea that corporations want to reserve financial gains for themselves and pass along losses to the rest of society, potentially through lobbying the government for assistance. This practice was criticized in the Wall Street bailout of 2008. Subsidies considered excessive, unwarranted, wasteful, unfair, inefficient, or bought by lobbying are often called corporate welfare. 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 uncompetitive, or anti-competitive ways. For instance, in the United States, agricultural subsidies are usually portrayed as helping 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. Alan Peters and Peter Fisher, Associate Professors at the University of Iowa, have estimated that state and local governments provide $40–50 billion annually in economic development incentives, which critics characterize as corporate welfare.