Make Corporations Pay Their Own Bills

British Petroleum has spent $35.5 billion cleaning up the mess it made with its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  But BP also was allowed to write off that cost as an expense of doing business, and so it got back more than $10 billion.  In other words, you and I paid British Petroleum $10 billion to clean up its own mess.

It’s not just BP.  Bankers who helped drive our economy to its knees in 2008 were forced to pay off some of the people they had cheated, but then they were allowed to write off those payments, just as BP was.  Same result: you and I paid Big Banks billions to clean up their own mess. 

There must be countless other Big Businesses that charge you and me for the Big Mistakes they make.  Add that to the billions of dollars we pay in corporate welfare to some of the nation’s biggest Big Businesses, a significant bite has been taken out of our nation’s spending.

As Everett Dirksen said, “A billion here and a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

Hey, I have an idea.  Our federal government really does need to cut spending, so why don’t we start by eliminating those generous gifts?  And why don’t we also eliminate the billions we pay in corporate welfare to some of the nation’s biggest Big Businesses?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to make corporations pay for their own messes, and eliminate welfare to the rich, than to take the money from old folks (Social Security) and old sick folks (Medicare)?  Both those programs are called entitlements, but they’re really not because we pay for them.  Must we pay for the corporations, too?

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Corporations: Greed Tempered by Fear

Corporations are not evil, as some people believe.  They're just greedy and heartless by nature.

I was reminded of that by a series of articles in the New York Times this week that focused a spotlight on just that: Corporations exist only to  make money, and everything else be damned.

As is true of Wall Street itself, greed drives corporations and only fear tempers them.  They have no moral compass.  They pit cities and even states against one another in bidding wars to find where they can get the most tax breaks, new infrastructure, or whatever else they can get in return for a promise to come to town and create jobs.

But when those plans don't make money for the corporations, or when they don't make enough money -- and often they don't -- the corporations pull up stakes, leave town, and stick us taxpayers with the bill.

Does the principle of greed/fear work for corporations?  Of course it does.  But not so much for their employees.  Corporate profits have risen some 300 percent since the Great Recession began, while the average employee's paycheck during that time has remained about the same, or gotten smaller.  (Executives continue to get their bonuses, however.)

As Chris Hedges writes in his book, Death of the Liberal Class, "They (corporations) exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill and lie to make money.  They throw poor families our of their homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars to make profits, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women."

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