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Both Parties Are United In Support Of Corporate Welfare

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Peter Fricke Contributor
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For all that separates the Republican and Democratic parties, there is still broad bipartisan consensus in favor of taxpayer-funded handouts for influential corporations.

Michael Tanner asserted in National Review that, “conventional wisdom says that corporate welfare is the exclusive province of Republicans… [but] there are more than enough examples to show that corporate welfare is a bipartisan sin.”

The “most insidious” example of Democrat-supported cronyism is Obamacare, which Tanner describes as “a deal between the administration and insurers from the very beginning.”

For insurance companies, the individual mandate was a major boon, Tanner claims, because “insurers would accept additional regulation, but in exchange would be guaranteed millions of new customers,” Moreover. “Obamacare would even provide subsidies to help people buy their products.” (RELATED: Communism by Insurance Mandate)

The arrangement seems to have worked out well so far, considering that “most of the major insurance companies have seen their stocks rise more than 100 percent since 2010.”

In an effort to further insulate insurers from the potential costs of Obamacare, Tanner says, the administration is now throwing its weight into support for risk corridors, which “are essentially a mechanism to reimburse insurance companies for losses suffered because too many sick people enrolled in their plans.”

Tanner calls the concept of risk corridors “a sort of insurance-company socialism,” whereby the government imposes fees on companies that make “excessive” profits and transfers the proceeds to companies that lose money by pricing their policies too low. (RELATED: Obama Admin Rule Opens Door to Insurance Company Bailout)

Approaching the issue from a different perspective, Seton Motley claims in Red State that, “it’s usually Democrats who use the Leviathan as a government-money-and-regulation fundraising weapon,” but Republicans “are not immune to the pernicious infection that is Crony Socialism,” either (“it’s not Crony Capitalism,” they say, “because it has nothing to do with capitalism).

By way of example, Motley points to Republican support for a bill to ban online gambling that was sponsored by South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz. (RELATED: Is the GOP Going to Let Sheldon Adelson Buy an Online Gambling Ban?)

A major backer of that bill was casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who according to Motley “sees U.S. online gambling as a threat to his empire.”

Incidentally, Adelson has also “been a huge Republican donor – he gave $49.8 million to center-right Super PACs just in 2012,” and Motley suggests that the online gambling ban was his way of “looking for Crony Socialist legislative payback.”

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Peter Fricke