How much welfare Uncle Sam provides companies has long been one of the great mysteries of taxpayer spending. Like a secret underground river, boodles have flowed out of the Treasury and into corporate bank accounts without notice.
Now we finally have a first look at the size of that river and where the cash goes.
The federal government has quietly doled out $68 billion through 137 government giveaway programs since 2000, according to a new database built by a nonprofit research organization, Good Jobs First. It identified more than 164,000 gifts of taxpayer money to companies. You can look up company names, subsidy programs and other freebies at the Subsidy Tracker 3.0 website.
A report the organization released today, “Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations,” shows that big businesses raked in two-thirds of the welfare.
The most surprising and tantalizing finding is the identity of the biggest known recipient of federal welfare. That dubious honor belongs to Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company with a reputation for awful service andadmissions of incompetence. It collected $2.1 billion of welfare on a $5.4 billion investment in U.S. wind farmsfrom coast to coast.
In fact, 10 of the 50 biggest recipients of federal welfare are foreign-owned firms. Try to imagine Congress debating a bill giving welfare payments to poor Canadians, Mexicans and Europeans and you’ll see the absurdity of U.S. taxpayers providing welfare to the owners of foreign corporations.
How much welfare Uncle Sam provides companies has long been one of the great mysteries of taxpayer spending. Like a secret underground river, boodles have flowed out of the Treasury and into corporate bank accounts without notice.
Now we finally have a first look at the size of that river and where the cash goes.
The federal government has quietly doled out $68 billion through 137 government giveaway programs since 2000, according to a new database built by a nonprofit research organization, Good Jobs First. It identified more than 164,000 gifts of taxpayer money to companies. You can look up company names, subsidy programs and other freebies at the Subsidy Tracker 3.0 website.
A report the organization released today, “Uncle Sam’s Favorite Corporations,” shows that big businesses raked in two-thirds of the welfare.
The most surprising and tantalizing finding is the identity of the biggest known recipient of federal welfare. That dubious honor belongs to Iberdrola, a Spanish energy company with a reputation for awful service andadmissions of incompetence. It collected $2.1 billion of welfare on a $5.4 billion investment in U.S. wind farmsfrom coast to coast.
In fact, 10 of the 50 biggest recipients of federal welfare are foreign-owned firms. Try to imagine Congress debating a bill giving welfare payments to poor Canadians, Mexicans and Europeans and you’ll see the absurdity of U.S. taxpayers providing welfare to the owners of foreign corporations.
New tool
Phil Mattera, Good Jobs’ research director, created a software tool that matches subsidiaries to parent companies, enabling him to identify the 1,800 parent companies that received welfare. Its database does not cover many known subsidies, such as Agriculture Department payments to corporate farms, and instead focuses on stealth subsidies on which little or no data have been available without digging through mountains of paperwork.
But for Mattera, who would have known that the $1.8 million of federal cash given to the Union Tank Car Co.actually benefits Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a controlling interest in the firm? In all, Buffett companies collected welfare from 11 programs totaling $179 million.
Because of Mattera’s efforts, we now know that 726 companies that collected $838 million in federal welfare were subsidiaries of General Electric, which also pocketed $533 million in state and local welfare.
That two of the most profitable firms in America dine at a taxpayer-financed buffet should alarm those who feel they are too heavily taxed or who believe in personal responsibility. After all, if Buffet’s company, with pretax profits of $28 billion last year, and GE, with $17 billion of pretax profits, cannot get by without welfare, who can?
The Good Jobs database is an important first step to bringing some balance to our understanding of the real scope of corporate welfare. The oft-cited justification is that it creates jobs. Yet we know that such subsidies often shrink the number of jobs and undermine competing firms not blessed with welfare. When government picks winners and losers, we all lose.
Phil Mattera, Good Jobs’ research director, created a software tool that matches subsidiaries to parent companies, enabling him to identify the 1,800 parent companies that received welfare. Its database does not cover many known subsidies, such as Agriculture Department payments to corporate farms, and instead focuses on stealth subsidies on which little or no data have been available without digging through mountains of paperwork.
But for Mattera, who would have known that the $1.8 million of federal cash given to the Union Tank Car Co.actually benefits Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a controlling interest in the firm? In all, Buffett companies collected welfare from 11 programs totaling $179 million.
Because of Mattera’s efforts, we now know that 726 companies that collected $838 million in federal welfare were subsidiaries of General Electric, which also pocketed $533 million in state and local welfare.
That two of the most profitable firms in America dine at a taxpayer-financed buffet should alarm those who feel they are too heavily taxed or who believe in personal responsibility. After all, if Buffet’s company, with pretax profits of $28 billion last year, and GE, with $17 billion of pretax profits, cannot get by without welfare, who can?
The Good Jobs database is an important first step to bringing some balance to our understanding of the real scope of corporate welfare. The oft-cited justification is that it creates jobs. Yet we know that such subsidies often shrink the number of jobs and undermine competing firms not blessed with welfare. When government picks winners and losers, we all lose.
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