Friday, November 03, 2006

corporate welfare

Corporate Welfare (Don’t Get Me Started)

The purpose of corporate welfare seems to be a way for corporations to rid themselves of tax burdens by basically encouraging cities and/or states to offer them incentives to locate or relocate in their area(s), leaving the unpaid tax burdens on the communities for a very long time; that includes the people that they end up hiring.
The cities and states need to offer these incentives and abatements to entice the corporations and companies to bring economic development to their particular areas. The problem is that someone will have to pick up the tab for any of these bribes in both the short and long run, and it falls on the individuals in those communities, and they are generally those who can least afford the extra expenses, and most likely would not be allowed to draw any type of personal welfare, even with the additional tax load put upon them by a business.
It seems that our government has lost its collective mind to pay multi-million-

dollar companies to do the very things the companies are in business to do, or that the government has done itself. In the case of Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, the government closed the facility, and then ended up offering almost 400 million dollars, between city, state, and federal governments, to re-open it for pretty much the same duties it had. In the past two years, they have added a 1 billion dollar incentive that is to create 6,000 more jobs, at a cost of 166,666 dollars per.
I realize that locating or relocating of some of the businesses would be beneficial to both the companies and the areas they move into, however; according to our “free market” system, the move would benefit both without gross misuse of tax cuts and dollars from anyone. That also means that big business gets the welfare and small businesses and individuals get the shaft.
My guess is that government, whether they are local, state, or federal, are uninterested in the welfare of people, it is only interest in the bottom-line for corporations. In my lifetime, we have had wars on poverty, drugs, and terrorism-all established by the government and they have all done nothing to abate or end the problems; they only cause them to become worse.
Corporate welfare is unfair. It is unfair, but I have learned that life is unfair. We have over 1 million homeless in our country. We allow laws to be passed that put or keep non-violent people in prison for years or the rest of their lives without giving them any reason to have any self-respect, most of them poor minorities. The rich keep getting richer in the U.S. and that’s the way they like it, whether it is their corporation, or themselves, anyone else be damned.
If we insisted that our government spend the money on actual solutions for our poor, disadvantaged, and minorities instead of pork-barrel spending that seems to only perpetuate the problem in many communities, we may get somewhere, but that would entail making new laws that actually prevented government officials from taking money from the companies or their interest groups. That is where the biggest problem stems from. When we learn that we must first take care of people before business, we may get somewhere.

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