Daniel TilsonIt is what it is. Most Floridians seem resigned to the corporate welfare system their elected officials have quietly created and perpetuated. As a result, another legislative session winds down without the welfare reform we need.
You may remember how debate about a growing “culture of entitlement” drove the Clinton administration in 1996 to reform the welfare system for America’s poorest citizens. The idea was to promote personal responsibility and accountability.
Now here we are almost 20 years later, and whether nationally or in states like Florida, a new culture of corporate entitlement has spawned a complex, corrupt corporate welfare system. And that system remains unrepentantly unreformed.
The “Occupy Wall Street” movement was as close as we’ve come to the kind of national consciousness-raising necessary to make such reform possible. It’s interesting to wonder what might have been had OWS zeroed in on the singular organizing goal of activating millions of middle-class Americans to demand an end to corporate welfare.
Maybe one of these years, social conservatives in the Tea Party will team up with social liberals in the progressive movement on a grassroots “End Corporate Welfare” campaign. That would make sense, since both political extremes oppose big government handouts to big corporations.
What makes less sense is that between those extremes, among the centrist majority of people and voters, there’s little alarm over a problem of epic proportions. We middle-class Florida taxpayers lose $3 billion to 4 billion annually to consistently condoned corporate tax evasion, loopholes, and myriad “incentives” eagerly awarded by Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature.
We pay for it with our sales taxes, property taxes and assorted other government fees, fines and special taxes. Worse still, we pay for it with unfairly underfunded public schools, higher education, hospitals and clinics, after-school programs, senior citizen services, libraries, parks, prisons, and more.
When a state government lets more than $3 billion a year in private corporate taxes go uncollected, it’s all those public systems, programs and services that suffer — along with all the hard-working and retired people who depend on them.
Still, there’s no large-scale, broad-based public outcry, no critical mass of angry phone calls and emails to the governor and legislators, demanding an end to corporate welfare.
If you consider food stamps or other social welfare programs to be government handouts to poor people who show too little personal responsibility and accountability, then why not apply those principles to corporate welfare? Why should your tax dollars cover up for wildly profitable corporations evading their tax responsibilities, or failing to be accountable for the “incentives” they get?
I get it that the politicians responsible for corporate welfare keep hard-selling a bill of goods about doing what’s “good for small businesses” and “job creators.” They throw in thinly veiled threats that if the handouts stop, businesses will relocate.
But just because politicians keep hard selling that Big Fish story, doesn’t mean you have to buy it hook, line and sinker.
Go fishing for factual information and you’ll find the corporations benefiting most from the welfare are overwhelmingly big ones making tons, that don’t need it. You’ll find they’ve “contributed” billions, literally, to politicians perpetuating the crooked system. You’ll find relocation threats to be bogus blackmail. And you’ll find a trail of broken promises, woeful underperformance and minimum wage poverty when it comes to the “job creation” Florida gets in return for welfare.
So if you get an email or phone call one of these years, asking you to send an email or make a phone call yourself, to help “End Corporate Welfare”…give it some thought.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
