World Corporatism

The Guardian shares with us some splendid news.

George Osborne makes announcement of credit, from April 2015, to help companies looking to make programmes in the UK

... George Osborne announced the tax break for live-action children’s programming in the government’s Autumn statement on Wednesday. ...

The help for production companies looking to make live-action children’s shows in the UK follows a similar and successful credit scheme for high-end dramas. “We will help one area of television production that has been in decline, with a new children’s television credit, alongside our new animation credit,” said the chancellor. “The government will introduce a new tax relief for children’s television programmes from April 2015.”

The government said the relief would be available at a rate of 25% on qualifying production expenditure. ... The incentives could lure more investment from US children’s TV powerhouses such as Disney and Viacom, which owns brands including the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon, as well as new digital players such as Netflix and Amazon. ...

Ah, yes. British Conservatives are following along behind Georgia Republicans and California Democrats, shoveling Free Money into the hungry, open mouths of our fine, entertainment conglomerates.

You can rail against Free Money for the undeserving poor. And you can curse the idea of Food Stamps. But the dole is really going on everywhere across the planet, and the entities who get the lion's share of the handouts aren't the riffraff who work for tiny wages. The bulk of our national treasure goes for ...

Price supports for big corporate farms.

Free money for Big Banks.

And of course foreign and domestic subsidies for corporations making movies and TV shows.

Per Subsidy Tracker 2.0, the Walt Disney Company (just to pull a random name out of the hat) has been awarded $381.5 million in government subsidies in recent years. And that airplane company named Boeing, up at the top of the Subsidy Tracker list? It's gained a grand total of $13,174,075,797. (That's 13 billion, if you have trouble counting all the commas.)

I long ago stopped wringing my hands about government welfare. Politicians scream about welfare chiselers living in the inner city, but few Democrats or Republicans dwell on the S & P 500 CEOs being showered with greenbacks, so I really don't know what all the hoo ha is about. $59 billion is spent on garden-variety welfare programs, while $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies.

Where's the politicians' outrage about that?