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Senior Citizen at Smirking Chimp has a brilliant idea. Menas test corporations like individuals are means tested for welfare. After all, we don't call it Wall Street Welfare for nothing.
Corporate Welfare As We Know It
Senior Citizen
SmirkingChimp.Com
Being a low-income senior citizen, I happen to know a little bit about welfare. Because my old-age Social Security benefits are low, I was able to apply for and obtain Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which is a welfare program and is therefore, as are all welfare programs, means-tested. That's because welfare programs are taken from taxpayer money and we don't want to tax working people just to give welfare to wealthy people who don't need it. Corporate bailouts are just another word for handouts, which means that they are also a form of welfare, also taken from tax money, and therefore should also be means-tested. What I had to do in order to qualify for SSI was prove that I had no more than $2,000 in assets, and agree to report and repay any future income above $25 a month.
Therefore I was taken aback when President Obama said that he would cap salaries for executives whose corporations were receiving bailout money at $500,000 or half a million dollars a year. Doesn't the President realize that the money from those bailouts is coming, in many cases, from wage-earners trying to support a family on salaries of less than $30,000 a year? How can the President take taxes from somebody who is struggling to support their kids at a low-wage job because their higher-wage job was outsourced by the corporate executive pleading for welfare, and give it to the guy who outsourced their job? It may not fit any accepted definition, but that sure sounds like torture to me, or at the very least, cruel and unusual punishment. Can something like that possibly be Constitutional? If it is necessary in order to have a social safety net to take something from those better off and give it to those who are in need, that's comprehensible, but not to steal from the poor to give to the rich, particularly not to the rich whose recklessness and negligence have caused a great deal of American poverty.
The same rules that apply to any welfare program should also apply to corporate welfare. If a corporation needs tax money, it should be able to get it, but the executives of that corporation should be entitled to keep no more than $2,000 in personal assets, excluding their home, car, and household furnishings, but including stocks, bonds, second cars, yachts, planes, pension plans, offshore bank accounts, gold and gems, etc. Any income above $2,000 a month should be reported to the government immediately and repaid to the taxpayers. If it is fair for senior citizens, why should the rules be different for corporate CEOs?
In order to benefit from a system, a person usually has to prove that they have contributed to it. Many of these corporations and their executives have never paid any taxes, so why should they be entitled to tax money? I admit that they have created jobs, but those jobs are in India or China, so why shouldn't India or China be responsible for bailing them out?
A corporate executive who had to learn to live on $2,000 a month might be less apt to outsource jobs or make risky investments. They'd quickly learn the value of a dollar instead of continuing to drive the dollar's value down. It isn't unfair or unreasonable to insist that corporate welfare be means-tested the same way that every other form of welfare is. That's a way to show a sense of responsibility and good stewardship of tax money. Surely the Republicans wouldn't want welfare money given to people who don't need it, and I think that the Democrats could also understand something so simple that makes so much sense. We don't begrudge corporate executives anything that they have earned by honest means and we're not capping their corporate profits or corporate salaries the way that some socialist countries do. We'd merely be insisting that if they are going to benefit from welfare, they prove that they are needy, just like anyone else.
The time has come, I firmly believe, to reform corporate welfare as we know it. Where's Bill Clinton when we need him?
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/20172
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