The Truth Blows Away Right Wing Claims On Fed Expenses

The right-wingers constantly spout that it is the government handouts to the poor, the elderly, the disabled, etc. that are budget breakers. The following web sites prove the conservatives’and neoconservatives’ assertions are totally wrong.

https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23

http:/www.whitehouse.gov/2012-taxreceipt

 

The right only seems to have a problem with Socialism, when the least wealthy may benefit.

 

It’s unlikely any conservatives or neoconservatives will take the time to click on the links listed in the OP, and even if they do, since the sites aren’t from FOX News or some other right wing source, the righties will not believe the information given.

Following is the text from the Common Dreams link:

Add It Up: The Average American Family Pays $6,000 a Year in Subsidies to Big Business

by Paul Buchheit

$6,000.

That's over and above our payments to the big companies for energy and food and housing and health care and all our tech devices. It's $6,000 that no family would have to pay if we truly lived in a competitive but well-regulated free-market economy.

The $6,000 figure is an average, which means that low-income families are paying less. But it also means that families (households) making over $72,000 are paying more than $6,000 to the corporations.


1. $870 for Direct Subsidies and Grants to Companies

The Cato Institute estimates that the U.S. federal government spends $100 billion a year on corporate welfare. That's an average of $870 for each one of America's 115 million families. Cato notes that this includes "cash payments to farmers and research funds to high-tech companies, as well as indirect subsidies, such as funding for overseas promotion of specific U.S. products and industries...It does not include tax preferences or trade restrictions."

It does include payments to 374 individuals on the plush Upper East Side of New York City, and others who own farms, including Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Ted Turner. Wealthy heir Mark Rockefeller received $342,000 to NOT farm, to allow his Idaho land to return to its natural state.

It also includes fossil fuel subsidies, which could be anywhere from $10 billion to $41 billion per year for research and development. Yet this may be substantially underestimated. The IMF reports U.S. fossil fuel subsidies of $502 billion, which would be almost $4,400 per U.S. family by taking into account "the effects of energy consumption on global warming [and] on public health through the adverse effects on local pollution." According to Grist, even this is an underestimate.

2. $696 for Business Incentives at the State, County, and City Levels

The subsidies mentioned above are federal subsidies. A New York Times investigation found that states, counties and cities give up over $80 billion each year to companies, with beneficiaries coming from "virtually every corner of the corporate world, encompassing oil and coal conglomerates, technology and entertainment companies, banks and big-box retail chains."

$80 billion a year is $696 for every U.S. family. But the Times notes that "The cost of the awards is certainly far higher."

3. $722 for Interest Rate Subsidies for Banks

According to the Huffington Post, the "U.S. Government Essentially Gives The Banks 3 Cents Of Every Tax Dollar." They cite research that calculates a nearly 1 percent benefit to banks when they borrow, through bonds and customer deposits and other liabilities. This amounts to a taxpayer subsidy of $83 billion, or about $722 from every American family.

The wealthiest five banks -- JPMorgan, Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., Wells Fargo & Co. and Goldman Sachs -- account for three-quarters of the total subsidy. The Huffington Post article notes that without the taxpayer subsidy, those banks would not make a profit. In other words, "the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders."

4. $350 for Retirement Fund Bank Fees

This was a tough one to calculate. Demos reports that over a lifetime, bank fees can "cost a median-income two-earner family nearly $155,000 and consume nearly one-third of their investment returns." Fees are well over one percent a year.

However, the Economic Policy Institute notes that the average middle-quintile retirement account is $34,981. A conservative one percent annual management fee translates to about $350 per family. This, again, is an average; many families have no retirement account. But many families pay much more than 1% in annual fees.

5. $1,268 for Overpriced Medications

According to Dean Baker, "government granted patent monopolies raise the price of prescription drugs by close to $270 billion a year compared to the free market price." This represents an astonishing annual cost of over $2,000 to an average American family.

OECD figures on pharmaceutical expenditures reveal that Americans spend almost twice the OECD average on drugs, an additional $460 per capita. This translates to $1,268 per household.

6. $870 for Corporate Tax Subsidies

We've heard a lot about tax avoidance and tax breaks for the super-rich. With regard to corporations alone, the Tax Foundation has concluded that their "special tax provisions" cost taxpayers over $100 billion per year, or $870 per family. Corporate benefits include items such as Graduated Corporate Income, Inventory Property Sales, Research and Experimentation Tax Credit, Accelerated Depreciation, and Deferred taxes.

Once again, it may be even worse. Citizens for Tax Justice cite a Government Accountability Office report that calculated a loss to the Treasury of $181 billion from corporate tax expenditures. That would be almost $1,600 per family.

7. $1,231 for Revenue Losses from Corporate Tax Havens

U.S. PIRG recently reported that the average 2012 taxpayer paid an extra $1,026 in taxes to make up for the revenue lost from offshore tax havens by corporations and wealthy individuals. With 138 million taxpayers (1.2 per household), that comes to $1,231 per household.

Much More Than an Insult

Overall, American families are paying an annual $6,000 subsidy to corporations that have doubled their profits and cut their taxes in half in ten years while cutting 2.9 million jobs in the U.S. and adding almost as many jobs overseas.

This is more than an insult. It's a devastating attack on the livelihoods of tens of millions of American families. And Congress just lets it happen.

 

blubbering idiocy

well at least that is partially correct, more accurately 47% are not only paying zero, they are themselves are lined up at the trough. Even at say $10K, it is still less for me than the social welfare programs ($13K alone in SSI and Medicare).

Learn some facts, conservatives are against these subsidies Tea Party groups take aim at farm bill, Republicans http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/23/tea-party-farm-bill-showdown/3172141/

some BS guesstimate with arbitrary assumptions, and no mention of solar subsidies like solyndra? Gee I wonder why

Half of locales are run by democrats

Once again, it is only republicans who opposed TARP and QE, try knowing something.

Stupid one, every fund has overhead, even federal bonds, to pay the people running it.

Doctors here prescribe more, and we take them. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130916122007.htm

Bullocks, keeping more of what they make is not a subsidy.

Bill Clinton championed free trade with China, and nobody's taxes went up because of this.


Just another lame liberal blowhard with no substance and no grasp of reality.

 

As I said, FOX News is the ONLY source of information accepted by the right wing. This makes their exceedingly high level of ignorance understandable.

 

The link posted is fundamentally flawed when it states "a well regulated free market." Utter nonsense, the web sites prove nothing.

 

You are against a well regulated free market?

 

Yes. A free market isn't regulated... that's an oxymoron.

 

That means you favor permitting the one percent and Big Business to manipulate stock prices and use insider trading to cheat small investors like you out of their 401k and other retirement savings. You want to allow corporate collusion, price fixing, and inventory controls that screw consumers with artificially inflated prices. You want working people to have no rights in the workplace. You want Big Business to freely pollute the air and water you and the other right-wingers mistakenly believe you can live without.

The free market you advocate might allow the super wealthy to prosper for a short time, but eventually it destroys everyone, because even the very rich need clean air and water.

The logic of the conservatives and neoconservatives escapes people of reason.

 

And yet because of coporate subsidies bread costs half as much as it might oher wise, and the cost of everything else is somewhat lower as well. Corporations do not pay taxes they collect them from their customers. And the idiot left thinks corporatons don't budget into their pricing the amount they expect to pay in taxes on x amount of dollars.

And yes even the rich need clean air and water which is why they don't knowingly screw them up, though they will cover up the fact that they unknowingly did so in order to avoid huge legal penalties. As late as 1978 we hadn't the technolgy to detect 50 parts per millon. Now we detect parts as small as one in a thousand trillion routinely. I am not entirely certain that stressing out over equivalent of 1 molecule in a glass of water doesn't do us more harm than consuming that molecule.

 

It IS entertaining to watch the right-wingers constantly shove their noses up the a$$es of the very rich and Big Business.

 

It is even more intriguing to watch the left consistently bite the hand that feeds them - businesses - while kissing the hand that rips big chunks out of their ass on a daily basis - government.

 

U.S. businesses cannot feed Americans without an army of workers, despite what conservatives and neoconservatives believe.

Right-wingers mistakenly believe businesses can exist without workers AND consumers.

No one has ever said businesses should not earn a fair profit. But when the conservatives and neoconservatives consistently defend the rights of businesses to underpay their employees, especially those that pay so poorly their workers must seek government assistance to put food on their tables, or when these businesses overcharge consumers for the inferior quality goods made in their factories in China, something is wrong with our system.

If the country continues on the course demanded by the right-wingers, soon, there will be far too few people left that can afford the crap businesses are trying to sell. What will the CEOs do to cure that problem?

A tree needs its roots for support and to sustain its life, without that root system the massive tree top dies. Is that simple picture too difficult for you right-wingers to understand?

 

fine retort there, loaded with data and reason.

Do you have a frontal lobe? you post a link with a one sentence comment, I refute you line by line in detail, and all you can say is 'Fox News'?

 

It's all that is necessary. FOX News and other "reliable" sources are all you people cite.

 

what a mouth breather, nothing was actually from FOX and you can't refute anything

 

Subsidy

1. Monetary assistance granted by a government to a person or group in support of an enterprise regarded as being in the public interest.

2. Financial assistance given by one person or government to another.

3. Money formerly granted to the British Crown by Parliament.

those are not subsidies given to those cooperation's. it is allowing them to keep their own money they earned
Not one dime of tax payer money is given to those businesses

 

So you dodge a persons arguments while calling them ignorant?

Pot: dude, your black

Kettle: racist!

 

Given that it is the left that is busily doing everything in it's power to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs and then (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)es like hell when it quits laying, I find these comments to be simplistic, fatuous, and more than a little self serving. You want to understand how capitlaism actually levels the playing field over time look at what fracking and horizontal drilling have done in South Dakota. Median income is up instead of down like most of the rest of the country, and McDonald's is offering a sign up bonus for workers and unemployment is the lowest in the country. When unemployment declines wages go up, when it increases wages go down. And yes it really is that simple...

 

His handlers have trained him to bark "fox news" on cue. He will say "rush" if you offer him a treat b

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See what I mean?

This is what brain scrubbing looks like.

 

I wish there were an adults only section here where you are required to know something, and have the intellect to be able to defend assertions. This guy spouts a cliché, links to left wing site as if it were scripture, then defends refuting details with "FOX News"

 

Over 50% of the budget are handouts.

 

And neither is it ever free to compete in it, so that's an oxymoron too. One which I note you ignored.

 

A free market is one in which there is choice of how you spend your money, or cow chips or gold dubloons or what ever else you wish to use as a medium of exchange.

It doesn't have to be free to engage in to be a free market.

 

That is a self contradicting statement.