Whatever policy flaws might afflict it, welfare for individuals
at least has a noble rationale: the alleviation of suffering. Not
so corporate welfare—which has all of the disadvantages of
social-welfare spending with none of the benefits.
Corporate welfare’s sole redeeming quality, to the extent it has any, is its relative size. Washington ladles out about $100 billion a year in handouts to the undeserving rich. That is a minute fraction of federal outlays for social welfare (Medicare alone will cost more than $670 billion this year). But it is still roughly $100 billion too much.
It is too much because of the system’s manifold flaws. The Obama administration provided a helpful but unintentional case study of those flaws through Solyndra, a company The Washington Post called “signature project of President Obama's initiative to help create clean-energy jobs.” The idea—other than helping out Solyndra’s principal backers, who had given lots of money to the Obama election effort—was to use government power to compensate for “market failure,” which is liberal-speak for “choices made by other people that we don’t like.” The real failure, as it turned out, was Solyndra, which went bankrupt.
The administration’s defenders say you can’t blame the administration for this because nobody could have foreseen the current oversupply of solar panels, or plunging silicon prices—and besides, Solyndra made a bad bet on the sort of solar panels to make, and yadda yadda.
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/05/the-worst-welfare-benefits-the-best-off
Corporate welfare’s sole redeeming quality, to the extent it has any, is its relative size. Washington ladles out about $100 billion a year in handouts to the undeserving rich. That is a minute fraction of federal outlays for social welfare (Medicare alone will cost more than $670 billion this year). But it is still roughly $100 billion too much.
It is too much because of the system’s manifold flaws. The Obama administration provided a helpful but unintentional case study of those flaws through Solyndra, a company The Washington Post called “signature project of President Obama's initiative to help create clean-energy jobs.” The idea—other than helping out Solyndra’s principal backers, who had given lots of money to the Obama election effort—was to use government power to compensate for “market failure,” which is liberal-speak for “choices made by other people that we don’t like.” The real failure, as it turned out, was Solyndra, which went bankrupt.
The administration’s defenders say you can’t blame the administration for this because nobody could have foreseen the current oversupply of solar panels, or plunging silicon prices—and besides, Solyndra made a bad bet on the sort of solar panels to make, and yadda yadda.
Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/09/05/the-worst-welfare-benefits-the-best-off
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