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In previous installments, we’ve noted that we could more than offset the need for the “sequestration” budget cuts by doing any one or combination of the following:

Ending massive subsidies to the giant banks
Reducing fraud and waste
Ending the failed drug war
Ending subsidies to the nuclear industry
Stopping the counter-productive quantitative easing by the Fed
Here’s another way to offset the need for budget cuts: cut off the welfare queens. (Jamie Dimon – shown above- and the other Wall Street queens are the largest recipients of welfare.)

Liberals and conservatives agree that we should stop subsidizing the fatcats. For example, the conservative Cato Institute points out that corporate welfare amounts to almost $100 billion per year. Cato notes:

Corporate welfare often subsidizes failing and mismanaged businesses and induces firms to spend more time on lobbying rather than on making better products. Instead of correcting market failures, federal subsidies misallocate resources and introduce government failures into the marketplace.

While corporate welfare may be popular with policymakers who want to aid home-state businesses, it undermines the broader economy and transfers wealth from average taxpaying households to favored firms. Corporate welfare also creates strong ties between politicians and business leaders, and these ties are often the source of corruption scandals in Washington. Americans are sick and tired of “crony capitalism,” and the way to solve the problem is to eliminate business subsidy programs.

Cato also notes:

The federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits …. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.

RTFA for sufficient detail about federal subsidies to country club crony capitalists to melt your brain. If anyone in Congress had a conscience or something even vaguely approaching ethical standards – this would have been resolved long ago. Some of this crap results from “temporary” measures put in place 20 years ago and never rescinded.