Category Archives: Corporate Welfare

“For anti-tax purists, including many in the Republican Party, … measures that roll back corporate subsidies, individual deductions or loopholes of any sort without comparable tax cuts elsewhere are considered tax increases.”
– Washington Post, 2011.04.15

Conservatives are beginning to divide into pragmatists and dogmatists as they move to quickly address the impending debt ceiling reaching its limit at some time in May 2011 and to begin negotiations over the 2012 budget which should be relatively complete by late July 2011.

Some tried and true conservatives believe that corporate welfare — the subsidization of business operations, or discounting of taxes due — must be eliminated if we are to move towards a balanced budget and reduced deficits and national debt.

Willingness to sacrifice corporate welfare includes Saxby Cham­bliss (R-Ga.), Sen Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), and Sen Tom Coburn (R-OK) as well as support from such conservative-movement fixtures as the Heritage Foundation, and the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

After Reagan agreed to raise taxes to offset huge growth in government defense spending, Grover Norquist of ‘Americans for Tax Reform’ gave us the Taxpayer Protection Pledge in the mid-1980s, which asks Republican lawmakers to take an absolute oath that they will not vote for any tax increase of any kind.

Norquist’s pledge has become dogmatic doctrine for the Republican Party.

Norquist now finds this dogma being challenged and he is personally being branded with the conservative buzzword of the year: sharia — Norquist is now being publicly called the “chief cleric of sharia tax law.”

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/no-tax-hike-pledge-creates-republican-rift-potential-roadblock-to-deficit-deal/2011/04/13/AFgWFdfD_story.html