America’s economy is in the toilet. It’s harder than it’s ever been in the history of our great nation to become rich, and there’s exactly one culprit: moochers. The ‘moocher class’ is sucking up huge amounts of our Federal budget (and most State budgets as well) and they’re doing almost nothing for our society. We have to stop them before they tear our country apart!
The Federal Budget’s Moocher-Friendly Programs
- Welfare: The strongly libertarian Cato Institute’s research indicates that, going back at least five years and probably dozens more, the moocher class has taken more than $100 billion annually from the Federal budget by suckling at the teat of welfare…corporate welfare. Boeing alone mooched a massive $15.7 billion dollars this year, and dozens of other companies, including Nike, Shell Oil, and Alcola (the world’s third-largest producer of aluminum) mooched more than $2 billion each.
- Unnecessary Payouts: According to USUncut, the provisions passed as part of the Medicare Part D expansion back in Dubya’s era have a problem — they actually disallow the government from negotiating with Big Pharma over drug prices paid by Medicare, Medicaid, and the government’s health insurance plans for its own employees. This ‘gift’ to the drug industry means we stick an extra $270 billion every year in the drug companies’ lazy, mooching pockets.
- Unnecessary Deductions: The Economic Policy Institute did a little investigating and found out that those massive golden parachutes that companies give their CEOs come with an unexpectedly delightful double-mooch. First, those golden parachutes naturally come at the expense of worker pay (because they certainly don’t deduct those costs from their profits, that would be crazy!). Second, many companies get a tax break based on the size of their CEO’s compensation package — a tax break that costs us about $7 billion every year.
- Cost-Plus Spending: When the Federal budget gets spent to hire a contractor (like, say, Boeing), they do so on what’s called a “Cost-Plus” basis. That means that the government agrees up front to pay whatever their project costs, and then add some extra amount to make the contract ‘worth their while.’ The problem is that “costs” include the cost of subcontracting, and every single one of the contractors the government hires on “Cost-Plus” contracts subcontract the heck out of that work, jack up the prices they pay the subcontractors (who get rich doing the work), and then report those jacked-up prices to the government as their “costs.” Net result, according to the Sunlight Foundation: for every dollar the top 200 government contractees spent lobbying the government for their contracts, they make $760 back — a total of $4.4 trillion/year for an outlay of just over $5 billion in lobbying money. Even if you assume that 80% of that is legitimate costs (which is extremely generous), that’s $880 billion annually in straight-up welfare money.
And Now, Reintroducing the Ex-Im Bank!
Yesterday, President Obama signed off on an order resurrecting the once-defunct Export-Import Bank, which is essentially nothing more than a way for certain businesses (Boeing, John Deere, General Electric, Ford..you get the idea) to borrow money at below-market rates with below-market fees. When it was defunded in mid-2014, the Ex-Im Bank (which proudly declares itself a supporter of small businesses) had a massive 64% of its loans go out to just 10 companies — 30.3% went to Boeing alone, according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Every dollar in discounted interest and fees that the Ex-Im bank provides these mooching moochers is a dollar that we could have had either in the Federal coffer where it belongs, or out there in the private sector as part of somebody’s paycheck. Obama called the Ex-Im Bank “little more than a fund for corporate welfare” back in 2008.
So how much in corporate welfare is this renewed millstone around the taxpayer’s necks going to cost us? The Congressional Budget Office has already done the math: $2 billion annually is going to flow from the pockets of the taxpayers to the evil, greedy moochers that annihilate our Federal budget each year.
Bringing It All Together
Adding up just those sources of corporate moocher welfare that appear in this list — which is far from comprehensive, mind you — we’re looking at $1,259,000,000 worth of Federal budget that is vanishing into the hands of corporate moochers. That’s enough to fund:
- All of Social Security Disability payouts,
- All of non-senior-citizen Medicare and Medicaid payouts,
- All public health services,
- All welfare programs, including unemployment, Section 8 housing, SNAP, TANF, and more, and…
- All of the interest the government owes…that’s the entire annual deficit, gone.
So the next time some conservative tries to tell you that moochers are ruining our country — agree wholeheartedly.
(Featured Image courtesy of USDAGov via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)
