Daily digest on Corporate welfare ----
http://cber.iweb.bsu.edu/propertytax/9-Hicks-and-LaFaive.pdf
2006 Study in Michigan showing that corporate welfare - tax breaks to encourage business do NOT bring in either the business or the job numbers promised. Essentially, in most cases the state did not even come close to breaking even in taxes earned.
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/posttech/2010/07/att_verizon_get_most_federal_a.html
AT&T, Verizon get most federal aid for phone service
AT&T and Verizon Communications were the biggest recipients of federal support from an $8 billion phone subsidy program, according to data released Thursday by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Over the past three years, AT&T received $1.3 billion in funds to deploy phone lines to rural areas. Verizon got $1.27 billion in the same 2007-09 period.
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http://www.dismountingourtiger.com/...porate-executives-thrive-on-lavish-welfare-2/
Corporations and corporate executives thrive on lavish welfare
Posted on May 25, 2010 by Edwin Lee
Most of us hold an interesting but fallacious cultural myth about large businesses: managements job is solely to maximize the return on investment to the stockholders, as if stockholders are the only ones responsible for the existence and health of the business. The myth includes no financial, ethical or legal obligations to society or to a healthy government except what little the law requires.
Without laws enforced by government and mostly voluntary adherence to them by all of us, according to principles we learned through universal education, there would be no mechanism to pool investors resources and operate them, no stockholders, no intellectual or property rights. Corporate and intellectual property laws evolved from the 17th century to the present. Government pays for codifying and enforcing them and for universal education that enables us to follow them coherently.
Without an effective transportation infrastructure, largely paid for by government including the education for how business and individuals can use it jointly, policed by government to eliminate highway robbery as a cost of business, businesses couldnt sell to large markets without building in the cost of private security forces and weeks to transport goods.
The list goes on, but many citizens, particularly those of the right wing persuasion, lack any sense of the intimate involvement of a healthy government and an educated society in successful businesses; vital supporting roles which most large corporations get for free!
In reality, corporations and their executives are the greatest recipients of welfare of all our citizenry. Much of this corporate welfare is sucked out of the companies by the executives to pad their salaries, bonuses and benefits. We have created and sustained hot house corporations and welfare executives that couldnt exist in a cold cruel world and yet many citizens and their pandering politicians cry foul when we expect our coddled corporate citizens to contribute their fair share for the health of government and society. There is nothing that the citizens of Greece have done to bankrupt their nation that our corporate citizens and their executives have not done to our economy in spades.

About Edwin Lee
Retired electrical engineer, entrepreneur, and CEO. Co-founder of four companies (2 successful and two other learning experiences), author and speaker, inventor with 23 US Patents. More complete bio at
www.elew.com
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http://finance.yahoo.com/tech-ticke...5.html?tickers=brk-b,gs,brk-a,xlf,wmt,tgt,cab
VIDEO GO WATCH THIS!!!
"This enormous growth of incomes at the top is not the result of market forces -- there's some market forces -- but it's largely the result of all these rules nobody knows about," he tells Dan and Aaron in this clip.
The problem starts with government subsidies, says Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. States are spending around $70 billion on government subsidies, he estimates. That doesn't include the hundreds of billions more doled out in federal subsidies.
"Is that capitalism?," he complains. "Go compete in a competitive arena. Don't go to Washington and say 'give me money' either by saying 'I don't have to pay taxes' or forcing other people to pay taxes that go to me. Go earn your money in the marketplace."