Manifest subsidy - government subsidies on private companies

[NNN0LHI]

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1554/is_n3_v21/ai_18008942

How Congress pays industry - with federal tax dollars - to deplete and destroy the nation's natural resources.

Common Cause Magazine, Fall, 1995 by Edward A. Chadd

Each time a fast-food customer picks up an order of fries, taxpayers pick up part of the tab. Food stamps? No, this is another kind of free lunch.

Eighty percent of the nation's fast-food fries are made from the Columbia River Basin Russett Burbank potato, which "makes a perfect frozen french fry but needs to grow in a desert with lots of water," explains one industry analyst.

Thanks to the Grand Coulee Dam, Washington state's Columbia Basin meets both poles of the oxymoron: It was a dust bowl before irrigation made it an agricultural powerhouse. Now potato processors sell 3 billion pounds of french fries each year to big retail chains, and everyone makes a tidy profit. Very tidy. One potato sorter, J.R. Simplot, parlayed the frozen french fry into a multibillion-dollar empire after meeting a hamburger-stand owner named Ray Kroc back in 1967.

But not everyone wins on this deal. The water that made the Columbia Basin bloom flows for a price, most of which the farmers, processors and retail chains don't pay. It's the American public that foots the bill for more than $3 billion in irrigation subsidies each year. Many of the water projects also threaten stocks of endangered salmon. The free lunch, it turns out, is not so free.

The potato industry is just one beneficiary of corporate welfare, the estimated $104 billion the federal government spent last year on subsidies, giveaways and tax breaks for favored industries. And while the reform-minded Congress has aimed its budget-cutting axe at school lunches, public broadcasting and poor women with children, the vast array of government handouts to business remain virtually unscathed. snip

The biggest beneficiaries of federal water projects are not small farmers but huge agribusinesses. By reorganizing their vast land holdings into interconnected corporations and trusts that look like separate farms, many agribusinesses have managed to get around a law that sets a 960-acre limit for recipients of taxpayer-provided irrigation water.

One such farm baron, Republican soft-money donor J.G. Boswell, is believed to have more land - as much as 192,000 acres - under cultivation than anyone else in America and is said to be worth half a billion dollars. Subsidized water helped make the man, and taxpayers all over the country still help pay to irrigate Boswell's bountiful crops of cotton and alfalfa. Taxpayers also subsidize Boswell's cotton crop; he and other irrigators who grow federally-subsidized crops are, in effect, being paid twice for expending a valuable commodity on an unneeded product. Estimates of this "double dip" portion of irrigation subsidies range from $85 million to $800 million a year.