Thursday, November 12, 1998

Seeing Newt in her rear-view mirror

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN - From here in the have-no-mercy-liberals camp, the political weather continues delightful. What could be more fun than watching Republicans turn on one another, snapping and snarling, throwing left hooks, right jabs and mud pies? Splendid doings.

From a strategic point of view, I suppose I should want House Speaker Newt Gingrich to stay, considering he's both hateful and incompetent. But I must admit to a mild case of Greater Good here: I'd really like America to see Gingrich in its rearview mirror, because he's a nasty piece of work who has brought American politics even lower than it would otherwise go. It's a good-of-the-nation moment.

The same might be said for our Texans in the House leadership, Majority Leader Dick Armey and Majority Whip Tom DeLay. Personally, I've always wondered what it says about Republicans that those two were chosen for leadership positions in the first place. Armey is an ideologue of no noticeable political skill, and DeLay has been so clumsy and heavy-handed in his abuse of power that it's been painful to watch, whether you're for him or against him. Let the caucus decide.

In the meantime, a wonderful corrective has appeared on the horizon - an astonishing piece of journalism so timely and so much more important to what is actually going on than all this political blather that I'm tempted to announce it in terms of "Lo, a star in the East."

In a typical item from the blather front, The New York Times sees internal Republican politics as leading to "still larger victories for minimal government and taxes, unfettered free enterprise and a return to conservative Christian values." That's almost a mantra (along with the fashionable new cliche, "conservatism with compassion" - the Bush brothers' theme song) that somehow Republicans need to "get back" to their core values of less government and lower taxes. What's wrong with this picture?

The answer is to be found in the current and forthcoming issues of Time magazine, in which the superb investigative team of Don Barlett and Jim Steele is unleashed on the subject of corporate welfare. Holy mackerel - what a story.

While the R's and the D's sit here having this silly pretend debate (education, the environment and Social Security, chant the D's; less government and lower taxes, chant the R's),what's really going on is being ignored by everyone. They're all giving away the store - to big corporate campaign donors, of course.

Even for those of us who regularly follow corporate welfare, the Barlett-Steele investigation is mind-boggling. To what measure can corporate welfare reach? And how much is it costing us? Barlett and Steele not only dug out the answers, they dug out still more astonishing information. The system doesn't even work; it's not producing jobs. All these taxpayer rip-offs, subsidies, tax abatements, low-cost loans - all for nothing.

While state and local governments have caved in to this folly to an extent that's beyond stupid and well into acutely embarrassing, the feds are still the biggest Uncle Sugar of them all, handing out $125 billion in corporate welfare during a time of robust economic growth and corporate profits. It's insane. Barlett and Steele's conclusion is that the corporate welfare system exactly mimics the most criticized aspects of traditional welfare programs: It "is unfair, destroys incentive, perpetuates dependence and distorts the economy." But instead of rewarding the poor, it rewards the powerful.

Corporate welfare also penalizes the rest of us; for every tax advantage given to a corporation, the tax burden shared by the rest of us is that much greater. Just in federal taxes, it is the equivalent of all the income tax paid by 60 million individuals and families. Lower taxes, anyone?

At the state and local levels, the folly knows no bounds. The investigators found cases in which governments gave away $323,000 in taxes and services to secure a $50,000 job that couldn't yield that much in taxes over several lifetimes.

And as usual, the system is weighted toward the biggest (and biggest contributors): "Ten million jobs have been created since 1990. But most of those jobs have been created at small- and medium-sized companies, from high-tech start-ups to franchised cleaning services. Fortune 500 companies, on the other hand, have erased more jobs than they have created this past decade, and yet they are the biggest beneficiaries of corporate welfare."

This is my idea of extraordinary political journalism - investigating the real effects of politics on our lives. True, it has nothing to do with spin, counterspin or Monica Lewinsky, but it sure does make a lot of difference to the people of this country.

Molly Ivins' column regularly runs on Mondays and Thursdays.

Creators Syndicate, Inc.