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Is this accurate? It basically says that middle class people spend six times as much paying for corporate subsidies than they spend paying for things like defe

Is this accurate? It basically says that middle class people spend six times as much paying for corporate subsidies than they spend paying for things like defense, welfare payments, medicare, etc., combined. The fact that the information is conveyed using a poor-quality jpeg screenshot of an unattributed infographic from two years ago, however, does not inspire confidence. The two sources at the bottom of the graphic are redirected to the following: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/09/23/add-it-average-american-family-pays-6000-year-subsidies-big-business http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/09/23/add-it-average-... https://www.whitehouse.gov/2014-taxreceipt https://www.whitehouse.gov/2014-taxreceipt It looks like this claim is based on aggregating direct subsidies, inflated profits enabled by government mandates and protections, and lost tax income resulting from preferential tax policies and tax shelters.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago
No it's not accurate. I mean hell, $7 of your $50k goes to welfare? That's 0.014%. In reality, depending on what you want to call welfare (republicans like to call everything welfare and pretend it's bankrupting the country in order to scale it down, for example, so you have wildly different definitions in the political spectrum) it's around 5-8% of GDP. So this is just laughably inaccurate. Defense spending of $250, in reality it's closer to $2k. Then there's the corporate subsidies, they're more interesting because they're not necessarily wrong. Perhaps this number is but in general they're very high, but not in the way people normally think about subsidies. I see numbers thrown around all the time with murky definitions and it's misleading. For example, the IMF did a study that showed $5.3 trillion in oil subsidies worldwide. Gigantic number, consider world GDP is $75 trillion, US a little under $18 t. Now I'm sympathetic to the study, agree with it, and think we should take that number seriously and do something about it. I also think it constitutes a form of subsidy. But it's a bit misleading to say this means we're all paying thousands of dollars to corporate subsidies on this basis from our actual paycheck. There are different forms of subsidies and there's value in not muddying the semantics too much. What the study measures are externalities that aren't priced in. A person dies in motorised traffic? You can combat it by pricing that into the price of oil. A climate change related natural disaster happens, or we have to pay for CO2 cleanup, or healthcare costs rise due to oil-industry fumes causing lung cancer somewhere, you can price all of that in. Not pricing that in is a form of subsidy, but it's not like we take thousands of dollars from our pay check and send it to the companies to support them, very little money goes to these companies, the issue is we don't extract enough from them that we should once we look at the damage they cause, and this is technically a subsidy. The IMF measures the missed revenue from taxing fossil fuels at a lower range than it should if it prices in all externalities. Yet I've seen renowned green energy pundits in my country (the Netherlands) talk about these $5.3 trillion subsidies as if we're sending that money to corporations every year. I'm completely on their side, yet I don't think this is helpful, there's too much misleading information thrown around.
- projectileboy 11y ago
  You bring up many excellent points. There are worthwhile corporate subsidies, just like there are worthwhile social "welfare" programs. I've known many US citizens who criticized "welfare" (i.e., food stamps for the urban poor), who were perfectly happy to pick up unemployment checks. My original point wasn't really to criticize all corporate subsidies per se, but simply to point out that when US citizens criticize "welfare", it's often a result of their having been cynically manipulated away from focusing on their own real interests.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

No it's not accurate. I mean hell, $7 of your $50k goes to welfare? That's 0.014%. In reality, depending on what you want to call welfare (republicans like to call everything welfare and pretend it's bankrupting the country in order to scale it down, for example, so you have wildly different definitions in the political spectrum) it's around 5-8% of GDP. So this is just laughably inaccurate. Defense spending of $250, in reality it's closer to $2k. Then there's the corporate subsidies, they're more interesting because they're not necessarily wrong. Perhaps this number is but in general they're very high, but not in the way people normally think about subsidies. I see numbers thrown around all the time with murky definitions and it's misleading. For example, the IMF did a study that showed $5.3 trillion in oil subsidies worldwide. Gigantic number, consider world GDP is $75 trillion, US a little under $18 t. Now I'm sympathetic to the study, agree with it, and think we should take that number seriously and do something about it. I also think it constitutes a form of subsidy. But it's a bit misleading to say this means we're all paying thousands of dollars to corporate subsidies on this basis from our actual paycheck. There are different forms of subsidies and there's value in not muddying the semantics too much. What the study measures are externalities that aren't priced in. A person dies in motorised traffic? You can combat it by pricing that into the price of oil. A climate change related natural disaster happens, or we have to pay for CO2 cleanup, or healthcare costs rise due to oil-industry fumes causing lung cancer somewhere, you can price all of that in. Not pricing that in is a form of subsidy, but it's not like we take thousands of dollars from our pay check and send it to the companies to support them, very little money goes to these companies, the issue is we don't extract enough from them that we should once we look at the damage they cause, and this is technically a subsidy. The IMF measures the missed revenue from taxing fossil fuels at a lower range than it should if it prices in all externalities. Yet I've seen renowned green energy pundits in my country (the Netherlands) talk about these $5.3 trillion subsidies as if we're sending that money to corporations every year. I'm completely on their side, yet I don't think this is helpful, there's too much misleading information thrown around.

projectileboy 11y ago
You bring up many excellent points. There are worthwhile corporate subsidies, just like there are worthwhile social "welfare" programs. I've known many US citizens who criticized "welfare" (i.e., food stamps for the urban poor), who were perfectly happy to pick up unemployment checks. My original point wasn't really to criticize all corporate subsidies per se, but simply to point out that when US citizens criticize "welfare", it's often a result of their having been cynically manipulated away from focusing on their own real interests.