The Welfare House

[IceMan30]

This is how I would handle the Welfare program for the poor in my country called "The United British Republic of the Arctic Territories".


They would not get one unearned cent from the Government for ANYTHING.
Instead the lifestyle that keeps them poor has got to go.


I would have a Campus, with the following facilities.

One Behavioral Health Rehab center, where they are treated for the behavioral issues that keeps them poor.
That's where they learn how to dress, how to maintain their hygiene, how to treat people and respect people, and where they learn Anger management skills, Social skills and Etiquette, and to detox from any physical or psychological addictions they have.

Then they move into one of the 100 Bunkhouse barracks.
And the following training facilities.

50, Two classroom, 1 office and 1 kitchen small school houses.
10 Woodshops
10 Industrial Shops
10 Automotive repair shops and Carwashes.
10 Model Homes (to use for Home economics training.
10 General Stores
One Restaurant and Bar
10 Greenhouse, Lawn and Gardens
Five Trucking centers.

And what we do for a period of three years, is give them Job and Life Skills.

This is how it works.

We start off by teaching them how to dress, and how to maintain their Hygiene.
Then we teach them Manners, Social skills, Anger Management skills and Etiquette (again).
Then we educate them from the First Grade up to the 12th in an accelerated program.
Then we teach them job skills and life skills.

And they go on field trips to the following places to learn about the world beyond poverty.

Apartment complexes
Zoos and Aquariums
National Parks
Museums
Sports Arenas
Gyms
Libraries


They cannot graduate until they have the following.

A High School Diploma
A Trade School Diploma
A Business Management, Accounting, Real Estate and Insurance Diploma
A CDL with Air Brakes endorsement
A Housekeeping certification
A First Aid Certification
And pass a psychological and occupational skills examination.

Then we put them into the "United British Republic Work Corps" where they do work for the cities, gaining experience.

Driving Busses and Trucks, Cleaning the streets, repairing roads and electrical equipment and doing landscaping work in public places.
For pay.

 

[ThoughtCrimes]

Did you borrow that basic idea from Huxley?

"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't."
Bill Shakespeare, "The Tempest"

 

[Windship]

Really?...well, what would you do about this?:







CLASS WAR
10 Taxpayer Handouts to the Super Rich That Will Make Your Blood Boil
Tom Cahill | October 28, 2015
The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.




The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

A small number of incredibly wealthy Americans are ridiculing Bernie Sanders’ base for wanting “free stuff” when the costliest programs are, by far, corporate welfare and entitlements for the top 1 percent. Fox News has been working hard to tear down Sanders’ proposals to provide Medicare for all, institute tuition-free public college, boost infrastructure spending, and expand Social Security.

“That’s not fiscally possible unless the federal government starts seizing private assets,” said Bill O’Reilly.

But O’Reilly is wrong. The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

1. TAX BREAKS FOR OBSCENE CEO BONUSES ($7 BILLION/YEAR)
Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

2. TAX CUTS FOR LUXURY CORPORATE JETS ($300 MILLION/YEAR)
Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

3. BIG OIL SUBSIDIES ($37.5 BILLION/YEAR)
According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

4. PHARMACEUTICAL SUBSIDIES ($270 BILLION/YEAR)
As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.


Combined profits of top pharma companies. Data courtesy of healthcareforamericanow.org.

This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

5. CAPITAL GAINS TAX BREAKS ($51 BILLION/YEAR)
When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.


Chart courtesy of The Century Foundation.

If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

6. CORPORATE TAX SUBSIDIES FROM STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ($80.4 BILLION/YEAR)
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.


Current cost of existing federal college aid. (courtesy of The Atlantic)

7. HANDOUTS TO BIG AG ($18 BILLION/YEAR)
Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

8. WELFARE FOR WALL STREET ($83 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

9. EXPORT-IMPORT BANK SUBSIDIES ($112 BILLION)
This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.



According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

10. FEDERAL CONTRACTS FOR THE TOP 200 BIGGEST COMPANIES ($880 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts. That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients. This chart shows how much the top ten corporations spent on lobbying and how much they got in return:




The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year. The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total. This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.







Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact Tom via email at [email protected].

 

[Anathema]

You had me up through "Trade School Diploma". At that point you went off the rails by forcing them to get multiple licenses and endorsements then bringing them into the Public Workforce rather than pushing them into the Private Sector.

 

[danielpalos]

Really?...well, what would you do about this?:







CLASS WAR
10 Taxpayer Handouts to the Super Rich That Will Make Your Blood Boil
Tom Cahill | October 28, 2015
The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.




The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

A small number of incredibly wealthy Americans are ridiculing Bernie Sanders’ base for wanting “free stuff” when the costliest programs are, by far, corporate welfare and entitlements for the top 1 percent. Fox News has been working hard to tear down Sanders’ proposals to provide Medicare for all, institute tuition-free public college, boost infrastructure spending, and expand Social Security.

“That’s not fiscally possible unless the federal government starts seizing private assets,” said Bill O’Reilly.

But O’Reilly is wrong. The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

1. TAX BREAKS FOR OBSCENE CEO BONUSES ($7 BILLION/YEAR)
Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

2. TAX CUTS FOR LUXURY CORPORATE JETS ($300 MILLION/YEAR)
Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

3. BIG OIL SUBSIDIES ($37.5 BILLION/YEAR)
According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

4. PHARMACEUTICAL SUBSIDIES ($270 BILLION/YEAR)
As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.


Combined profits of top pharma companies. Data courtesy of healthcareforamericanow.org.

This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

5. CAPITAL GAINS TAX BREAKS ($51 BILLION/YEAR)
When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.


Chart courtesy of The Century Foundation.

If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

6. CORPORATE TAX SUBSIDIES FROM STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ($80.4 BILLION/YEAR)
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.


Current cost of existing federal college aid. (courtesy of The Atlantic)

7. HANDOUTS TO BIG AG ($18 BILLION/YEAR)
Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

8. WELFARE FOR WALL STREET ($83 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

9. EXPORT-IMPORT BANK SUBSIDIES ($112 BILLION)
This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.



According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

10. FEDERAL CONTRACTS FOR THE TOP 200 BIGGEST COMPANIES ($880 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts. That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients. This chart shows how much the top ten corporations spent on lobbying and how much they got in return:




The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year. The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total. This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.







Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact Tom via email at [email protected].

it may be too complicated for the right. all they seem to understand that is taxes are too high.

 

[IceMan30]

You had me up through "Trade School Diploma". At that point you went off the rails by forcing them to get multiple licenses and endorsements then bringing them into the Public Workforce rather than pushing them into the Private Sector.

Its not our job to push people into the private (firing) sector.
Its our job to solve their problems, ONE TIME, the problems that THEY created for themselves.
Its THEIR job to put themselves into the private sector.. its our job to make that possible through the public sector through healthcare, education, training and experience.

Its our job to put them into the public sector to help our country function.

 

[IceMan30]

Really?...well, what would you do about this?:







CLASS WAR
10 Taxpayer Handouts to the Super Rich That Will Make Your Blood Boil
Tom Cahill | October 28, 2015
The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.




The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

A small number of incredibly wealthy Americans are ridiculing Bernie Sanders’ base for wanting “free stuff” when the costliest programs are, by far, corporate welfare and entitlements for the top 1 percent. Fox News has been working hard to tear down Sanders’ proposals to provide Medicare for all, institute tuition-free public college, boost infrastructure spending, and expand Social Security.

“That’s not fiscally possible unless the federal government starts seizing private assets,” said Bill O’Reilly.

But O’Reilly is wrong. The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

1. TAX BREAKS FOR OBSCENE CEO BONUSES ($7 BILLION/YEAR)
Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

2. TAX CUTS FOR LUXURY CORPORATE JETS ($300 MILLION/YEAR)
Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

3. BIG OIL SUBSIDIES ($37.5 BILLION/YEAR)
According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

4. PHARMACEUTICAL SUBSIDIES ($270 BILLION/YEAR)
As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.


Combined profits of top pharma companies. Data courtesy of healthcareforamericanow.org.

This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

5. CAPITAL GAINS TAX BREAKS ($51 BILLION/YEAR)
When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.


Chart courtesy of The Century Foundation.

If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

6. CORPORATE TAX SUBSIDIES FROM STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ($80.4 BILLION/YEAR)
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.


Current cost of existing federal college aid. (courtesy of The Atlantic)

7. HANDOUTS TO BIG AG ($18 BILLION/YEAR)
Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

8. WELFARE FOR WALL STREET ($83 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

9. EXPORT-IMPORT BANK SUBSIDIES ($112 BILLION)
This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.



According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

10. FEDERAL CONTRACTS FOR THE TOP 200 BIGGEST COMPANIES ($880 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts. That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients. This chart shows how much the top ten corporations spent on lobbying and how much they got in return:




The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year. The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total. This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.







Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact Tom via email at [email protected].

it may be too complicated for the right. all they seem to understand that is taxes are too high.

No we're not going to subsidize the "everything but myself is the problem" attitude.
If you want money, unless you're wasting away from muscular dystrophy or your have the intelligence of a dog, you need to work for it.

And part of doing that is being fit and ready to do so.

 

[danielpalos]

Really?...well, what would you do about this?:







CLASS WAR
10 Taxpayer Handouts to the Super Rich That Will Make Your Blood Boil
Tom Cahill | October 28, 2015
The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.




The next time you hear someone complain about how the poor get “all this free stuff,” show them this.

A small number of incredibly wealthy Americans are ridiculing Bernie Sanders’ base for wanting “free stuff” when the costliest programs are, by far, corporate welfare and entitlements for the top 1 percent. Fox News has been working hard to tear down Sanders’ proposals to provide Medicare for all, institute tuition-free public college, boost infrastructure spending, and expand Social Security.

“That’s not fiscally possible unless the federal government starts seizing private assets,” said Bill O’Reilly.

But O’Reilly is wrong. The money for Sanders’ platform can easily come from eliminating the costliest entitlement programs for the top 1 percent and multinational corporations. Here’s a breakdown of the most superfluous giveaways to the rich and how much they cost the rest of us:

1. TAX BREAKS FOR OBSCENE CEO BONUSES ($7 BILLION/YEAR)
Currently, the biggest corporations are exploiting a 20-year-old loophole that allows them to write off inflated compensation packages for CEOs, billing stock options, and performance-based bonuses to taxpayers. In 2010, the Economic Policy Institute found out that the biggest corporations cost Americans $7 billion by writing off inflated executive pay. Between 2007 and 2010, this loophole accounted for more than $30 billion in corporate welfare. According to The Guardian, fast food industry CEOs cost taxpayers $64 million through this loophole.

That $7 billion could singlehandedly fund the annual budget for the National Science Foundation — which, as I recently reported for US Uncut, funds 11,000 scientific research projects each year and has funded 26 Nobel laureates in the last 5 years.

2. TAX CUTS FOR LUXURY CORPORATE JETS ($300 MILLION/YEAR)
Currently, corporations can claim a huge tax deduction every year by writing off purchases of corporate jets, lavish cars, and chauffeurs as “security” for their top executives. A Bloomberg analysis from 2011 showed that these tax breaks for some of the wealthiest Americans cost the rest of us $300 million each year. While that may not sound like much, that’s approximately 50 percent of the annual budget for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren that protects Americans from the financial sector’s most predatory schemes.

3. BIG OIL SUBSIDIES ($37.5 BILLION/YEAR)
According to Oil Change International (OCI), the U.S. government spends anywhere between $10 billion and $52 billion per year on corporate welfare for the fossil fuel industry — one of the wealthiest industries in the world. OCI estimated that total combined subsidies to big oil approached $37.5 billion in 2014, which includes $21 billion on production and exploration subsidies.

These subsidies alone cost more than what we currently spend on providing rental assistance for low-income families. In 2013, the department of Housing and Urban Development allocated a total of $34.3 billion toward tenant-based rental assistance ($19 billion), project-based rental assistance ($8.7 billion), and general public housing programs ($6.6 billion). These programs helped 4.5 million families — half of whom are elderly — keep a roof over their head.

4. PHARMACEUTICAL SUBSIDIES ($270 BILLION/YEAR)
As US Uncut has previously reported, the pharmaceutical industry costs taxpayers roughly $270 billion a year when accounting for the cost we pay for life-saving drugs whose patents have been bought up by Big Pharma. This is over $1,914 per household in corporate welfare. This is partly due to the Medicare Part D bill that George W. Bush signed into law in 2003, which prevents Medicare from negotiating drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. But the biggest drug companies also make a pretty penny (a combined $711 billion in profits between 2003 and 2012) by buying patents for drugs that were largely developed with taxpayer-funded research, then jacking up the price by absurd amounts after cornering the market.


Combined profits of top pharma companies. Data courtesy of healthcareforamericanow.org.

This $270 billion annual subsidy could be virtually eliminated by passing Bernie Sanders’ bill to establish a government fund that buys up drug patents as soon as they become available for purchase. Then, the government would sell drugs at-cost to save money for those who need them. The money saved could pay for the annual $270 billion in insurance costs from Obamacare that would help more Americans get access to healthcare.

5. CAPITAL GAINS TAX BREAKS ($51 BILLION/YEAR)
When anyone makes money from selling off investments, the IRS classifies that as capital gains, which are taxed at a lower rate (20 percent as of 2012) than real, actual work (35 percent). Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don’t affect the incomes of most retirees. The Century Foundation found that the total amount of lost revenue by taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages cost $256 billion between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, or $51 billion a year over the last 5 years. According to the Tax Policy Center, if investment income was taxed at the same rate as wages, 75 percent of that new revenue would come from the richest 0.3 percent of Americans; 92 percent of that revenue would come from those making $200,000 or more per year. The chart below shows what percentage of income each tax bracket makes from capital gains — not surprisingly, the wealthiest Americans get most of the benefit from capital gains.


Chart courtesy of The Century Foundation.

If we taxed wealth like work, the extra $51 billion per year in savings could fund two-thirds of the annual budget for food stamps.

6. CORPORATE TAX SUBSIDIES FROM STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS ($80.4 BILLION/YEAR)
In 2012, the New York Times did an analysis of every existing tax break in each of the 50 states and learned that 1,874 programs cost taxpayers $80.4 billion every year for corporate welfare in their state. Compare that cost with the cost of providing tuition-free public college to every student, which The Atlantic estimated would be a mere $62.6 billion. As the chart below shows, this is actually way cheaper than what we currently spend on federal student aid.


Current cost of existing federal college aid. (courtesy of The Atlantic)

7. HANDOUTS TO BIG AG ($18 BILLION/YEAR)
Crop insurance — a program originally intended to help farmers recover from the dust bowls of the 1930s — has become a slush fund for wealthy corporate farmers who have become experts at manipulating the system for their own means. As Bloomberg reported, the median income of commercial farm households (in which farming makes up more than 50 percent of a household’s income) was $84,649 in 2011 — 70 percent more than the average American household. Farmers have learned to exploit the program by growing crops on land they know will be unproductive, then making money from insurance claims rather than crops. In 2011, 26 farmers each got an annual subsidy of $1 million, including one tomato farmer in Florida who got a $1.9 million subsidy.

This $18 billion in corporate welfare is more than NASA’s annual budget, which has hovered around the $17 billion mark since 2009.

8. WELFARE FOR WALL STREET ($83 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest banks have grown even bigger than they were just before the 2008 financial meltdown. And due to their size, these banks are perceived as “too big to fail,” as their demise would spell doom for the US financial sector as a whole. So as these big banks grow bigger, the Federal Reserve allows them to borrow at lower interest rates than other big banks — essentially subsidizing the continued growth of the big banks. In 2013, Bloomberg estimated the ten biggest TBTF banks suck up $83 billion per year in corporate welfare.

If we were to force the big banks to borrow at the same interest rates as every other bank at a rate of $83 billion per year, that would be enough to double the current federal budgets for highway spending ($48.6 billion), Head Start ($10.1 billion), the Environmental Protection Agency ($7.89 billion), nutrition assistance for women, infants, and children ($6.2 billion), the National Parks Service ($3 billion), and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation ($2.39 billion), with $5 billion left over.

9. EXPORT-IMPORT BANK SUBSIDIES ($112 BILLION)
This week, the House of Representatives voted to revive the Export-Import (Ex-Im) bank, which has been maligned as a slush fund for large, multinational corporations. In its most recent year, the Ex-Im bank had a $112 billion portfolio, of which $90 billion went to multinationals. If that wasn’t bad enough, a huge portion of that money went to just 10 wealthy corporations.



According to the New York Times, the federal government spends roughly $105 billion on public K-12 schools. If we allow the Ex-Im bank to fade away, the money formerly set aside for corporate subsidies could instead double that investment in public education.

10. FEDERAL CONTRACTS FOR THE TOP 200 BIGGEST COMPANIES ($880 BILLION/YEAR)
The biggest 200 corporations have an excessively unfair advantage over their competitors due to their influence in Washington. According to the Sunlight Foundation, the top 200 companies spent a combined $5.8 billion on lobbying Congress between 2007 and 2012. And in those same years, those companies received $4.4 trillion in federal contracts. That $4.4 trillion is $100 billion more than what the U.S. government spent on providing a basic income to the nation’s 50 million Social Security recipients. This chart shows how much the top ten corporations spent on lobbying and how much they got in return:




The combined cost of these 10 corporate welfare programs is $1.539 trillion per year. The three main programs needy families depend upon — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families ($17.3 billion), food stamps ($74 billion), and the Earned Income Tax Credit ($67.2 billion) — cost just $158.5 billion in total. This means we spend ten times as much on corporate welfare and handouts to the top 1 percent than we do on welfare for working families struggling to make ends meet.







Tom Cahill is a writer for US Uncut based in the Pacific Northwest. He specializes in coverage of political, economic, and environmental news. You can contact Tom via email at [email protected].

it may be too complicated for the right. all they seem to understand that is taxes are too high.

No we're not going to subsidize the "everything but myself is the problem" attitude.
If you want money, unless you're wasting away from muscular dystrophy or your have the intelligence of a dog, you need to work for it.

And part of doing that is being fit and ready to do so.

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

 

[Anathema]

Its not our job to push people into the private (firing) sector.
Its our job to solve their problems, ONE TIME, the problems that THEY created for themselves.
Its THEIR job to put themselves into the private sector.. its our job to make that possible through the public sector through healthcare, education, training and experience.

Its our job to put them into the public sector to help our country function.

I see your mistake, and it's what I expected..... you don't comprehend Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution sufficiently to understand that there should not be a significant Public Sector job market outside of the military.

Those jobs shouldn't exist for anyone, ever, in the Public Sector. They should almost all be privatized.

 

[Anathema]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

 

[IceMan30]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

If you quit your job, there should be no unemployment services for them unless they can prove that they were abused OR laid off.
There is no "boo hoo, I don't like it, so I quit".

Its their job to grow up and be men and women.
Not wusses.

There is no wuss defense.

And the unemployment service is that they are put into the Work Corps directly, until they can find another job.

 

[danielpalos]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

it is the law; it is just not enforced that way.

 

[danielpalos]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

If you quit your job, there should be no unemployment services for them unless they can prove that they were abused OR laid off.
There is no "boo hoo, I don't like it, so I quit".

Its their job to grow up and be men and women.
Not wusses.

There is no wuss defense.

And the unemployment service is that they are put into the Work Corps directly, until they can find another job.

the law is employment at the will of either party. why be illegal to the law.

 

[IceMan30]

First of all the Constitution doesn't protect the private or public sector economics.
Secondly the US constitution doesn't apply AT ALL WHATSOEVER to the United Republic.

 

[IceMan30]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

If you quit your job, there should be no unemployment services for them unless they can prove that they were abused OR laid off.
There is no "boo hoo, I don't like it, so I quit".

Its their job to grow up and be men and women.
Not wusses.

There is no wuss defense.

And the unemployment service is that they are put into the Work Corps directly, until they can find another job.

the law is employment at the will of either party. why be illegal to the law.

You don't have to work.
But you don't have to eat either.
Unless you can't work.

And what we do with those types who can't work... is put them into sheltered workshops, and they earn their subsidies and a minimum wage.

 

[danielpalos]

First of all the Constitution doesn't protect the private or public sector economics.
Secondly the US constitution doesn't apply AT ALL WHATSOEVER to the United Republic.

yes, it does, via Due Process.

 

[danielpalos]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

If you quit your job, there should be no unemployment services for them unless they can prove that they were abused OR laid off.
There is no "boo hoo, I don't like it, so I quit".

Its their job to grow up and be men and women.
Not wusses.

There is no wuss defense.

And the unemployment service is that they are put into the Work Corps directly, until they can find another job.

the law is employment at the will of either party. why be illegal to the law.

You don't have to work.
But you don't have to eat either.
Unless you can't work.

And what we do with those types who can't work... is put them into sheltered workshops, and they earn their subsidies and a minimum wage.

that is why no one takes the right seriously about economics.

it is about privatizing costs not socializing costs simply so the rich can get richer faster by having the poor work harder for less.

 

[IceMan30]

First of all the Constitution doesn't protect the private or public sector economics.
Secondly the US constitution doesn't apply AT ALL WHATSOEVER to the United Republic.

yes, it does, via Due Process.

Due process means that we can't make you do 10 years in prison without having a trial by a jury of your peers.
It doesn't mean that you get to sit around and do nothing and live off of everybody else because you can't get your shit straight.

It also doesn't mean that you don't get time (in any type of) correctional facility after being convicted of a crime.

 

[IceMan30]

employment is at the will of either party, not just the employer for unemployment compensation purposes; regardless of our current and extra-lawful regime.

Did you just suggest that unemployment benefits should be available to people who quit their job in addition to those laid off?

If you quit your job, there should be no unemployment services for them unless they can prove that they were abused OR laid off.
There is no "boo hoo, I don't like it, so I quit".

Its their job to grow up and be men and women.
Not wusses.

There is no wuss defense.

And the unemployment service is that they are put into the Work Corps directly, until they can find another job.

the law is employment at the will of either party. why be illegal to the law.

You don't have to work.
But you don't have to eat either.
Unless you can't work.

And what we do with those types who can't work... is put them into sheltered workshops, and they earn their subsidies and a minimum wage.

that is why no one takes the right seriously about economics.

it is about privatizing costs not socializing costs simply so the rich can get richer faster by having the poor work harder for less.

yeah well the right won and the right is the President of the USA.
What you call right anyway.
we're tired of funding sloth.

The problem with the American right, is that they don't have an answer.
I came up with several tested programs that works by putting people to work.

 

[Anathema]

First of all the Constitution doesn't protect the private or public sector economics.
Secondly the US constitution doesn't apply AT ALL WHATSOEVER to the United Republic.

My apologies. Just don't expect any Visa applications from me or my family to visit.