Corporate welfare

Back in the mid-90s when welfare reform was all the rage I recall several prominent Democrats taking Republicans to task for targeting individual recipients of welfare but ignoring the phenomenon of corporate welfare. I wasn't familiar with the concept at the time, but the more I looked into it I had to agree with them: a lot of taxpayer dollars are used to directly or indirectly promote the interests of individual corporations or industries, and that's wrong.

These calls to end the corporate gravy train have been echoed on the right side of the ideological spectrum by think-tanks such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation. This would seem to be one of the few things that the right and left can both agree on, right?

Wrong.

Robert Novak details what happened when my favorite Senator, Tom Coburn (R-OK), attempted to derail a blatant corporate welfare handout to a major defense contractor:

An earmark in the bill's Senate version would give $500 million to Northrop Grumman to reimburse cost overruns on U.S. Navy shipbuilding contracts caused by Katrina damage at the Mississippi Gulf Coast shipyards in Pascagoula and Gulfport. If the bill had been completed last week, money for the highly profitable defense contractor would not have been there -- an incentive for Northrop Grumman to lobby all the harder this week.

...Coburn told the Senate on May 2 that the Northrop Grumman payment "sets a terrible precedent for the future." He called it "a step too far. I believe we need to back up and let the private sector take care of its obligations." He mentioned unspecified federal "largesse" for the company, pointing to the questionable DDX destroyer.

...Efforts such as Coburn's over the years have been slapped down hard, but not this time. The Coburn amendment barely lost, 51 to 48, in a rare Senate vote crossing party lines. Republicans split 28 to 27 against Mississippi's powerful senators, with John McCain and Majority Leader Bill Frist supporting Coburn. Democrats voted 24 to 20 for Northrop Grumman. North Dakota's twin deficit hawks, Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan, voted with Coburn, but Edward M. Kennedy, Hillary Clinton and Democratic Leader Harry Reid supported corporate welfare.

So Republicans voted by the narrowest of margins to support Coburn while Democrats -- denying themselves an opportunity to deal the GOP a legislative setback -- voted slightly in favor of it.

And this really symbolizes where things stand politically. Republicans are pathetic and Democrats are even more pathetic. Voters truly are forced to choose between the lesser of two evils, and every day it becomes more difficult to distinguish exactly which side that is.

Update: One massive reason I am inclined to score Republicans higher on corporate welfare than Democrats is because of Democrats' opposition towards free trade, which is one of the best tools available for halting the corporate gravy train. Indeed, even the New York Times favors expanded free trade efforts.