Example research essay topic: Robbing American Taxpayers Through Big Business - 1,469 words

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For most Americans the term welfare is associated with any number of negative images: laziness, illegitimacy, family breakup, irresponsibility, and wasted tax dollars. We hear "welfare" and our minds conjure up a young unwed mother of two or three infants, huddled in front of a TV set in a public housing tenement and living at taxpayer expense on monthly Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) checks and food stamps. We react negatively because too often these checks subsidize bad behavior and encourage dependency rather than self-responsibility. The American Heritage dictionary defines welfare as "receiving regular assistance from the government or a private agency because of need. " What is surprising about our modern-day welfare state is just who it is that Congress really believes to be "in need. " Some of the most subsidized recipients of public assistance are not welfare queens housed in public tenement apartments. They are not even poor or ailing at all. Far from it.

America's most costly welfare recipients today are Fortune 500 companies. In 1997 the Fortune 500 corporations recorded best-ever earnings of $ 325 billion, yet incredibly Uncle Sam doled out nearly $ 100 billion in taxpayer subsidies. 1 These welfare payments come in every conceivable shape and size: government grants, sweetheart business deals arranged by the Commerce Department, cut-rate insurance, low-interest loans, a protective wall against foreign competition, exclusive government contracts, and a mind-boggling maze of special interest loopholes in the tax code. Table 1 lists the 1997 appropriations for fifty-five of the most unjustified federal business subsidy spending programs as compiled by the Cato Institute. Their combined price tag came to $ 38 billion in 1997. All but a small handful of America's wealthiest corporations have participated in the hunt for federal or state government subsidies. Most of these companies are double-, triple-, and quadruple-dipping.

In 1996 General Electric won fifteen grants for $ 20. 1 million. Rockwell International received thirty-nine grants for $ 25. 4 million. Westinghouse Electric received fourteen grants for $ 26. 1 million. Yet each of these companies had profits of at least half a billion dollars in 1996.

Corporate welfare has all the systemic debilitating effects, including dependency and self-destructive behavior, that characterized the troubled legacy of the Great Society social welfare agencies. Just as the social welfare state became a pernicious, self-perpetuating industry inside Washington, so it is today with the corporate welfare state. For example, Representative Dick Armey has shown that the growth of the tax code and its special interest provisions has exactly paralleled the growth of the Washington K Street lobbying industry (see figure 1). In the mid- 1990 s Congress and the states -- at the urging of the American voters -- enacted major reforms in social welfare programs. There are now time limits on welfare benefits. Work, training, or education is now typically required in exchange for benefits.

The result: welfare rolls are down by 40 percent over the past five years and record levels of former recipients now working and paying taxes, not collecting them. None of this reform ethic has taken root in the realm of corporate welfare. There is no plan in Congress or the White House to attack business subsidies. In fact, the business community has come to regard subsidy payments as de facto entitlements. There is no "two years and off" time limit when it comes to corporate handouts. With the exception of a few valiant anti corporate welfare warriors -- such as Republicans Senator John McCain and Representative John Kasich and Democrats Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Tom Andrews -- almost no one in Washington wants to make an enemy of big business.

As a Washington Post expos on fiscal favors for big business noted, "Corporate welfare is the pork that won't slice. " Republicans in Congress won't cut even the most egregious corporate welfare programs, such as the Department of Commerce's high-tech grants to Silicon Valley and the advertising subsidies for Ralston Purina cat food and California's dancing raisins. Bill Clinton and Al Gore say they want to "reinvent government" and end irresponsible business subsidies, but their actual record has been to call for larger benefits. In 1997 alone, for example, the Clinton administration requested a 4 percent overall increase in corporate welfare payments. 2 Sixteen corporate subsidy programs were scheduled to receive increases of 10 percent or more. If perhaps for different reasons, both the left and the right in America should recognize the damaging effects of the expansion of the modern corporate welfare state. Democrats should understand that corporate welfare is the essence of corrupt government. We have basically put Uncle Sam up for sale to the highest bidder -- and that is seldom the poor, the disabled, or the working-class family with two wage earners struggling to pay the electric bills each month.

Meanwhile, Republicans on the right should see that business handouts make big business a mere ward of the state -- an advocate of government expansionism and a well-financed enemy of Adam Smith's invisible hand capitalism. Corporate welfare, in sum, is the antithesis of good government and the antithesis of a free market economic system. Your Tax Dollars at Work (for IBM, GE... ) Corporate welfare comes in all shapes and sizes. Here are some prominent examples of the misappropriation of tax dollars in the federal budget.

Through the Rural Electrification Administration -- now called the Rural Utilities Services (obsolete federal programs never go away, they just change their identity) -- and the federal Power Marketing Administrations, the federal government provides some $ 2 billion in subsidies each year to large and profitable electric utility cooperatives, such as ALLTEL, which had sales of $ 2. 3 billion last year. 3 Federally subsidized electricity holds down the costs of running ski resorts in Aspen, Colorado, five-star hotels in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and gambling casinos in Las Vegas, Nevada. 4 In 1997 the Forest Service spent $ 140 million building roads in national forests, thus subsidizing the removal of timber from federal lands by multimillion-dollar timber companies. Over the past twenty years the Forest Service has built 340, 000 miles of roads -- more than eight times the length of the interstate highway system -- primarily for the benefit of logging companies. 5 The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Market Promotion Program (MAP) spends some $ 100 million per year underwriting the cost of advertising American products abroad. In 1995 MAP gave $ 500, 000 to Tyson Foods; $ 526, 000 to the Pillsbury dough boy; $ 308, 000 to Ocean Spray Cranberries; $ 2 million to the California Prune Board; $ 1 million to the Kentucky Distillers' Association (yes, Congress subsidizes the production and sale of booze); $ 14, 000 to High Mountain Jerky (they make the famous Beef Jerky), and $ 281, 000 to the Campbell Soup Company. Mmm, mmm, good!

In the past MAP has even provided subsidies for foreign sales of U. S. tobacco products -- thus contributing to the export of cancer and heart disease. The USDA says that MAP enhances U. S. exports of "high value-added commodities. " But then why did Uncle Sam shovel out $ 239, 000 in 1995 to Ralston Purina?

Since when is cat food a "high value-added product"? Since Dick Gephardt, who represents Saint Louis, Ralston Purina's headquarters, became the highest-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives. In 1994 a House of Representatives investigative team discovered that federal environmental cleanup and defense contractors had been milking federal taxpayers for millions of dollars in entertainment, recreation, and party expenses. 6 Martin Marietta charged the Pentagon $ 263, 000 for a Smokey Robinson concert, $ 20, 000 for the purchase of golf balls, and $ 7, 500 for a 1993 office Christmas party. Ecology and Environment of Lancaster, New York, spent $ 243, 000 of funds designated for environmental cleanup on "employee morale" and $ 37, 000 on tennis lessons, bike races, golf tournaments, and other entertainment. 7 From 1990 to 1994, the Commerce Department doled out $ 280 million in research grants to eight of the hundred largest companies in America -- Amoco Corporation, AT& T, Citicorp, DuPont, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, and Motorola. But as the Philadelphia Inquirer discovered in a brilliant expos on the Commerce Department program, these firms had combined profits of $ 26. 8 billion in 1994. 8 It's doubtful whether these Fortune 500 firms won Uncle Sam's lottery by chance. Federal election campaign records show that these firms, or their executives, doled out nearly $ 1 million of contributions to both political parties that year.

An estimated 40 percent of the $ 1. 4 billion sugar price support program benefits the largest 1 percent of sugar farms. The thirty-three largest sugar cane plantations each receive more than $ 1 milli...

Research essay sample on Robbing American Taxpayers Through Big Business