American Poor Not Getting the Help They Need, But Corporations Sure Are

As F. Scott Fitzgerald said many years ago, the rich are not like you or me: They need the government's assistance to get by. There are all sorts of ways in which the government helps those who have the most.

A New Study Released Tuesday says half the Nation's Poor are not Getting the Food Stamps to which they are Entitled. Overall, 50.2 percent of the nation’s qualified poor received food stamps in 2004, according to the study by the National Priorities Project, a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group that examines the local impact of federal budget policies. The District of Columbia had the highest participation rate in 2004, at 71.8 percent.

"We've got over 35 million people in this country struggling to get enough food to eat, and 50 percent of all low-income people are not receiving the benefit that is intended to alleviate this food insecurity," said Greg Speeter, the project’s executive director. "While the food-stamp program provides a vital service, clearly too many people are still going without."

The food-stamp program was founded in 1964 and run by the Department of Agriculture and is the largest of the federal government’s food and nutrition programs. In 2004, the program cost $28.6 billion, or 1.2 percent of total federal spending, and served 23.2 million people, according to the study. It is also the easiest public assistance program the poor may gain access to, including immigrants who have been banned from just about everything.

There are all kinds of reasons (rationalizations) for the drop in participation, but the fact remains as it does for Welfare and other public assistance programs for the poor, the public stigma attached to welfare is a big reason for low participation rates as is those persons who administer the program throw so many rules at citizens and recipients it becomes nearly impossible to qualify or more aptly to stay qualified.

Of course that is for public assistance for the poor. Public assistance for the rich has no stigma, instead those on the rolls of corporate welfare feel entitled and actually make us feel it is our duty to provide these perks to the rich.

For instance an article Welfare as We Know it describes some of these programs. Bill Gates might have to work for a living if the government didn't grant Microsoft a copyright monopoly on its software... there are much more efficient ways for the government to provide incentives. But, the more efficient mechanisms may not make Bill Gates and his ilk quite so rich, so politicians who hope to get elected and reelected don't talk about them.

The CEOs of drug companies like Pfizer and Merck are able to earn tens of millions of dollars each year only because the government grants them patent monopolies on their drugs. As a result of their government granted monopolies, drugs that would sell for $4 a prescription in a competitive market can instead be sold for hundreds of dollars per prescription, and sometimes even more.

This is enormously inefficient from an economic standpoint. It also leads to unnecessary suffering on the part of millions of people who must struggle to pay for their drugs out of pocket, or deal with crazy bureaucratic rules to get insurers to pick up the tab. But, when it comes to helping the most affluent, efficiency is a secondary consideration.

The right markets corporate welfare as the "market" and welfare to the poor is marketed as "handouts." Why do we allow this? There are so many more examples one could cite to.

One of the most egregious forms of corporate welfare can be found at a little known federal agency called the Export-Import Bank, an institution that has a budget of about $1 billion a year and the capability of putting at risk some $15.5 billion in loan guarantees annually. At a time when the government is under-funding veterans' needs, education, health care, housing and many other vital services, over 80% of the subsidies distributed by the Export-Import Bank goes to Fortune 500 corporations. Among the companies that receive taxpayer support from the Ex-Im are Enron, Boeing, Halliburton, Mobil Oil, IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Motorola, Lucent Technologies, FedEx, General Motors, Raytheon, and United Technologies.

General Motors has received over $500 million in direct loans and loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank. The result? GM has shrunk its U.S. workforce from 559,000 to 314,000.

Motorola has received almost $500 million in direct loans and loan subsidies from the Ex-Im Bank. The result? A mere 56 percent of its workforce is now located in the United States.
In fact, according to Time Magazine, the top five recipients of Ex-Im subsidies over the past decade have reduced their workforce by 38% - more than a third of a million jobs down the drain. These same five companies have received more than 60 percent of all Export-Import Bank subsidies. Boeing, the leading Ex-Im recipient, has reduced its workforce by more than 100,000 employees over the past ten years.

These subsidy programs are endless for the rich. Yet, poor people have to beg, steal and borrow and at times cheat just to stay afloat. I would do the same thing if I knew the inequities in the system.

For more on corporate welfare see a Ralph Nader article that appeared at the beginning of the millennium.