Quotes & Sayings About Government Subsidies

It is government policy to phase out subsidies to nationalised industries. In line with this, the government hopes that the coal industry will be able to operate without the need for assistance apart from social grants. — Tony Benn

It's a vain hope to believe that people will voluntarily turn their back on government subsidies. — James Cook

Ex-Presidents of the United States get state subsidies. Not so in Russia. You get no government support. — Mikhail Gorbachev

It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government - education, food, rent subsidies - are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government. — Elizabeth Strout

Nuclear power is a permanent disaster. Producing its uranium fuel is an environmental disaster - now tucked and folded over the horizon in mostly-poor countries where miners are paid $5 a day and unprotected against radiation. Building reactors is a financial disaster, always shifted to government subsidies. Waste disposal is both an environmental and economic disaster. When the fateful time comes to decommission the Doomsday Machines, after the easy 10-year life extensions run out, this is another economic disaster. But when a reactor becomes what it really is - the most massive Dirty Bomb you or Bin Laden (radhi Allah anhu) can imagine - the nuclear disaster will be hard to yank out of the media, quicktime, and carry on like nothing ever happened. — Andrew McKillop

In almost every enterprise, government has provided business with opportunities for private gain at public expense. Government nurtures private capital accumulation through a process of subsidies, supports, and deficit spending and an increasingly inequitable tax system. — Michael Parenti

Our existing media system today is the direct result of government laws and subsidies that created it. — Robert McChesney

This initiative requires one major change in government policy: Shift the massive subsidies that currently find their way to agribusiness and use that taxpayer money to create the infrastructure for a healthy, affordable food system. This will not happen overnight; it is a long-term initiative that could eventually bring us a sustainable agricultural system. Let's — George Lakoff

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we'll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren't causes of middle-class status, they're markers for possessing the kinds of traits - self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. - that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn't produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them. — Glenn Reynolds

You ever notice how the folks who talk loudest about small government always seem to live in the states with the biggest subsidies? — Lee Child

In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or — David McCullough

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world. — Richard Flanagan

Subsidies and mandates are just two of the privileges that government can bestow on politically connected friends. Others include grants, loans, tax credits, favorable regulations, bailouts, loan guarantees, targeted tax breaks and no-bid contracts. — Charles Koch

The American Dream, coupled with government subsidies of utilities and cheap consumer goods courtesy of slave labour somewhere else, has kept the poor huddled masses from rising up. — Elizabeth Wurtzel

Exxon, one of the companies that has spent tens of millions of dollars denying climate change, denying any responsibility to deal with, taking government subsidies on a massive scale, now their ads are all about, 'Oh, we want a clean future. We're looking at clean energy and all that stuff.' — David Suzuki

The Senate is now considering increasing government subsidies for corn growers to produce more ethanol. If we produce enough ethanol we can postpone our next invasion of a Middle Eastern country for two to three years. — Jay Leno

From the late 19th century until the 1970s, the advanced societies of the West were all becoming less unequal. Thanks to progressive taxation, government subsidies for the poor, the provision of social services and guarantees against acute misfortune, modern democracies were shedding extremes of wealth and poverty. — Tony Judt

When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need. — Robert Reich

Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies. — Immanuel Wallerstein

The easy way to make money is to get special political privilege. From the beginning of time, business has cozied up to government and gotten restrictions on competition and subsidies and stuff. — Charles Koch

When the government makes loans or subsidies to business, what it does is to tax successful private business in order to support unsuccessful private business. — Henry Hazlitt

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war? — Ralph Nader

The government should move towards supporting aspirations and not entitlement. Subsidies supporting non-productive growth should be reduced. — Uday Kotak

The corporation is the dominant and dominating institution of our time. Governments identify growth and development with commercial corporations and shower them with subsidies, tax privileges, and appropriate labour legislation and market support to attract a commitment and investment. — Eric Kierans

Businessmen are notable for a peculiarly stalwart character, which enables them to enjoy without loss of self-reliance the benefits of tariffs, franchises, and even outright government subsidies. — Herbert J. Muller

When government taxes and regulates, what is seen are the visible effects of government contracts, grants, and subsidies. What is not seen are all of the property, business, and jobs that would have been created if citizens were left with the right to choose. — John Pugsley

Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is "Let the government fix it." Yet ... every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that ... the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise. — Lawrence Fertig

The Jacksonians were libertarians, plain and simple. Their program and ideology were libertarian; they strongly favored free enterprise and free markets, but they just as strongly opposed special subsidies and monopoly privileges conveyed by government to business or to any other group. — Murray Rothbard

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them. — Robert Reich

Government mandates, incidentally, are likely to distort rather than solve the problem of finding a market. I would, therefore, force my organization to live by its wits rather than to rely on capricious subsidies or non-economic-based regulation to fuel my business. — Clayton Christensen

As the contest proceeded, public interest increased and the entire country watched to see which company would win the big government subsidies through the mountains. — John Moody

Not too far away from now - in the next 6-7 years - 75 million Americans will be retail buyers of healthcare. And they'll come to the marketplace with their own money and either a subsidy from their employer or a subsidy from their government. And it doesn't much matter - they'll be spending their money. — Mark T Bertolini

Liberals fostered the subsidies that have converted so many citizens to helplessness. They have made high taxes and big government a way of life. They have corrupted the politicians into believing that in order to be elected to office, they must dispense benefits. — James Cook

If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies. — Milton Friedman

We're a nation with an eating disorder, and we know it. The multiple maladies caused by bad eating are taking a dire toll on our health
most tragically for our kids, who are predicted to be this country's first generation to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. That alone is a stunning enough fact to give us pause. So is a government policy that advises us to eat more fruits and vegetables, while doling out subsidies not to fruit and vegetable farmers, but to commodity crops destined to become soda pop and cheap burgers. The Farm Bill, as of this writing, could aptly be called the Farm Kill, both for its effects on small farmers and for what it does to us, the consumers who are financing it. — Barbara Kingsolver

It is only with government help - in the form of subsidies, restrictions on potential rivals, and the like - that business can "exploit" the public in any meaningful sense. That — Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Any time you read that your government is erecting tariff barriers, supporting threatened industries with subsidies, or interfering in any way with free trade between individuals or nations, you must realize that your standard of living is being lowered as a result. — John Pugsley

Every coercive monopoly was created by government intervention into the economy: by special privileges, such as franchises or subsidies, which closed the entry of competitors into a given field, by legislative action. — Ayn Rand

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

If candidates spend money on ads and other political speech and their opponents are rewarded with government handouts to attack them, that chills speech and is unconstitutional. Non-participating candidates certainly don't volunteer to allow their opponents to receive taxpayer subsidies to bash them. — Bradley A. Smith

Government subsidies can be critically analyzed according to a simple principle: You are smarter than the government, so when the government pays you to do something you wouldn't do on your own, it is almost always paying you to do something stupid. — P. J. O'Rourke

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. — Jose Angel Gurria

Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 (about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies) and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation. How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders? By making sure Congress passed tariffs keeping out foreign steel; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton; and by working 200,000 men twelve hours a day for wages that barely kept their families alive. And so it went, in industry after industry - shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the welfare state. — Howard Zinn

Most companies want free enterprise in general because that produces better goods and services and makes people's lives better, but they don't want it in their business. They want protection from competition, they want subsidies, they want the government to pick winners and losers, and they want to be picked as winners, and that's what we're opposing, and that's what drives my whole efforts in policy, and in the political arena. — Charles Koch

China's idea of fair trade is government subsidies of its textile and apparel exports to the United States, currency manipulation, and forgiveness of loans by its government banks. — Virginia Foxx

Giving the banks free interest loans is like the government subsidizing the banks. That's crazy! — Kenneth Eade

Government does the least good and the most harm through subsidies. — James Cook

Net result [of the Dept. of Agriculture's Payment in Kind - PIK - program]: total farm income, now expected to be around $25 billion, this fiscal year, will exceed total federal subsidies by only a couple of billion. You could argue that those fellows out there on the fruited plain are in effect working for the federal government and that, therefore, the U.S. now has socialized agriculture under the Reagan Administration. Rich, eh? — Daniel Seligman

This nation was founded on the principle of wealth creation. As
a young Henry Clay said in the House of Representatives in 1812,
"It [wealth creation] is a passion as unconquerable as any with which
nature has endowed us. You may attempt to regulate - you cannot
destroy it." That is supposed to be the federal government's primary objective.
It is supposed to promote the creation of an environment conducive
to the creation of wealth - not job creation, not bailouts, not subsidies,
not expansion of the federal bureaucracy, and not providing lifetime
support to those who choose not to take advantage of the innumerable
opportunities that exist in this nation for them to create a better,
more productive life for themselves. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

While big-business leaders and firms can be highly productive, servants of consumers in a free market economy, they are also all too often, seekers after subsidies, contracts, privileges, or cartels furnished by big government. Often, business lobbyists and leaders are the sparkplugs for the statist, interventionist system. — Murray Rothbard

I believe that if you go and ask a chief executive of a Goldman Sachs or a BP, and they answer you honestly ... they want monopolies, they want government subsidies, they want preferences - they're not interested in free markets. — Ian Bremmer

the German and Japanese governments heavily subsidized their chemical industries for war purposes. Government subsidies, direct or indirect, spurred German developments in synthetic rubber and plastics, synthetic fuels, light metals, and various other substitutes for natural materials.
However, the world's chemical industries would have grown rapidly without artificial encouragement. — George W. Stocking

There's a long history in the Middle East of "bread intifadas," starting with 1977 in Egypt, when Anwar Sadat tried to lift bread subsidies. People rebelled and poured into Tahrir Square, shouting slogans against the government just like they did earlier this year. Sadat learned his lesson and kept bread subsidies in place, and so did a host of other Middle Eastern dictators - many of whom were propped up for years by the West, partly through subsidized American wheat. — Annia Ciezadlo