Subsidies Quotes

“Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.”
― Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

“In Venezuela Chavez has made the co-ops a top political priority, giving them first refusal on government contracts and offering them economic incentives to trade with one another. By 2006, there were roughly 100,000 co-operatives in the country, employing more than 700,000 workers. Many are pieces of state infrastructure – toll booths, highway maintenance, health clinics – handed over to the communities to run. It’s a reverse of the logic of government outsourcing – rather than auctioning off pieces of the state to large corporations and losing democratic control, the people who use the resources are given the power to manage them, creating, at least in theory, both jobs and more responsive public services. Chavez’s many critics have derided these initiatives as handouts and unfair subsidies, of course. Yet in an era when Halliburton treats the U.S. government as its personal ATM for six years, withdraws upward of $20 billion in Iraq contracts alone, refuses to hire local workers either on the Gulf coast or in Iraq, then expresses its gratitude to U.S. taxpayers by moving its corporate headquarters to Dubai (with all the attendant tax and legal benefits), Chavez’s direct subsidies to regular people look significantly less radical.”
― Naomi Klein

“American farmers produced 600 more calories per person per day in 2000 than they did in 1980. But some calories got cheaper than others: Since 1980, the price of sweeteners and added fats (most of them derived, respectively, from subsidized corn and subsidized soybeans), dropped 20 percent, while the price of fresh fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“In her book The Government-Citizen Disconnect, the political scientist Suzanne Mettler reports that 96 percent of American adults have relied on a major government program at some point in their lives. Rich, middle-class, and poor families depend on different kinds of programs, but the average rich and middle-class family draws on the same number of government benefits as the average poor family. Student loans look like they were issued from a bank, but the only reason banks hand out money to eighteen-year-olds with no jobs, no credit, and no collateral is because the federal government guarantees the loans and pays half their interest. Financial advisers at Edward Jones or Prudential can help you sign up for 529 college savings plans, but those plans' generous tax benefits will cost the federal government an estimated $28.5 billion between 2017 and 2026. For most Americans under the age of sixty-five, health insurance appears to come from their jobs, but supporting this arrangement is one of the single largest tax breaks issued by the federal government, one that exempts the cost of employer-sponsored health insurance from taxable incomes. In 2022, this benefit is estimated to have cost the government $316 billion for those under sixty-five. By 2032, its price tag is projected to exceed $6oo billion. Almost half of all Americans receive government-subsidized health benefits through their employers, and over a third are enrolled in government-subsidized retirement benefits. These participation rates, driven primarily by rich and middle-class Americans, far exceed those of even the largest programs directed at low income families, such as food stamps (14 percent of Americans) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (19 percent).
Altogether, the United States spent $1.8 trillion on tax breaks in 2021. That amount exceeded total spending on law enforcement, education, housing, healthcare, diplomacy, and everything else that makes up our discretionary budget. Roughly half the benefits of the thirteen largest individual tax breaks accrue to the richest families, those with incomes that put them in the top 20 percent. The top I percent of income earners take home more than all middle-class families and double that of families in the bottom 20 percent. I can't tell you how many times someone has informed me that we should reduce military spending and redirect the savings to the poor. When this suggestion is made in a public venue, it always garners applause. I've met far fewer people who have suggested we boost aid to the poor by reducing tax breaks that mostly benefit the upper class, even though we spend over twice as much on them as on the military and national defense.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”
― Glenn Reynolds

“[A 2009 study of the Connecticut Development Agency found that companies receiving tax incentives] had created only 9 percent of the jobs they had forecast. The average subsidy for each new job: $367,910.”
― Greg LeRoy, The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation - How Corrupt Economic Development Brings Us Layoffs, Outsourcing, Overcrowded Schools, Runaway Sprawl and Higher Taxes

“The stories of failure are commonplace. Reporting that, five years after locating there, IBM fired most of its employees in Dubuque and Columbia despite a combined $84 million in tax breaks, the author of a Bloomberg News story noted that this scenario has 'played out often across America: Big company comes to town, provides boost to the local economy and then leaves.' The Kelo case ended similarly: New London provided Pfizer with significant subsidies only to see the company depart a few years later.”
― Richard Schragger

“Local and state tax incentives are much less visible because they do not constitute a direct charge to local budgets and are often paid for by future generations through municipal debt. This relative invisibility makes it much less probable that the local political process can be counted on to prevent bad incentive deals.”
― Richard Schragger

“There are the subsidies to the wealthy like the carried-interest tax loophole or the mortgage subsidy for yachts. By some calculations, corporate subsidies, credits, and loopholes are 50% higher than entitlements to the poor, not including medicare and medicaid.Some of the other subsidies are outlandish. Put a few goats on your golf course and you can classify it as farmland, as President Trump did, and you can save large sums in taxes. The tax code has come to serve the wealthy in myriad of ways.”
― Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn

“The society that lives on subsidies and freebies, is always responsible for a corrupt governance.”
― Dr. Ashok Anand

“Subsidies, modernization, weather hardening, and disaster recovery are some of the code words the government uses to detail massive amounts of free taxpayer money it gives to private corporations.”
― Steven Magee