This is the Cato Daily podcast for Monday, November 11th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Every politician loves a ribbon cutting.

It's positive.

It's high profile.

And it can get results at the ballot box.

But when those big ribbon cuttings come at the expense of massive handouts from state governments,

the question has to be asked. Was your vote influenced by a handout made with your tax dollars?

I spoke with John Mozina, the Center for Economic Accountability,

Kato Steve Slivinsky, earlier this month.

John, how do we define corporate welfare?

There's a lot of spending that government does that might look like a handout to some

corporation.

How do you view it?

We tend to look at it in the sense that the government, for whatever reason, is picking a particular company out of all of the various options out there and giving it a special benefit, whether that is a reduction in its taxes, whether that is a straight cash grant, whether it could be something as well as a loan guarantee or free land or increasingly in this

regulatory age, we see companies getting exempted from various code or permitting or land use

rules that other companies have to abide with. For us, it becomes corporate welfare when it is a specific, special decision that's made rather than sort of more broadly a broad tax break that's available to every company or to every company in a particular industry.

Or like a tax break that is objectively for anyone, but it's only for a football team.

It's only for a football team with a Native American mascot.

And then it's only for a football team with a Native American mascot that is or was based in Kansas City.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, governments and politicians play games all the time with the way that they try to address them something not, you know, not being the sort of bill of attainder or whatever.

But everybody who's watching knows exactly what's going on.

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