No Shortage of Handouts in America — if You’re Rich

Talk about health care in Europe or Canada or almost anywhere else in the world where the government plays a major role and many Americans decry what they characterize as "socialized" medicine.

They cling to the idea that the United States is strictly a free-market economy and view government programs and intervention as "welfare" and a misuse of tax dollars.

No doubt that's what you'd hear from the same broke bankers on Wall Street who got a $30 billion bailout from the Federal Reserve in mid-March.

And that's just the latest public and spectacular example of government funds being used as handouts to America's richest and wealthiest citizens and corporations, as New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston — a member of The Newspaper Guild-CWA Local 31003 — details in a new book.

Called "Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You with the Bill)," the book examines how everyone from golf course developers and sports team owners to Paris Hilton and George W. Bush have benefited from government subsidies.

"Do we really want to tax ourselves so that rich men can spend less flying in luxury to play golf?" Johnston asks, explaining that while America's poor and sick worry and suffer, the rich know how to work the system.

Among scores of examples, he notes the subsidies the billionaire Donald Trump receives to run his casinos, the tax breaks that big-box retailers get in order to open more stores that then ruin smaller, local businesses, the vast profits of home security companies that drain local police resources with false alarms, and the legal maneuvers of the Hilton family to thwart hotel founder Conrad Hilton's will in which he intended to leave most of his fortune to the needy.

As for George W. Bush, Johnston details the scheme to finance a new stadium for his Texas Rangers baseball team with a half-cent sales tax on Arlington, Texas, residents. "The Rangers investors had pockets plenty deep enough to build a new stadium, but that was not what Bush had in mind," Johnston wrote.

Further, in the most extreme form of government intervention, Bush sought more than 200 acres to develop not just the stadium but an entertainment zone of hotels and restaurants. When some property owners refused to sell — at least at the price Bush and his partners offered — the wealthy investors, "simply had the city of Arlington seize all the land they needed and more, using the government's power of eminent domain to get the land they coveted but were unwilling to buy in the market."

Johnston also talks about the business of health care in the United States and the false idea that market forces can make it a fair and efficient system.

What we have instead, he says, "is a horribly distorted marketplace where the health care companies, engorged by unchecked greed, ration health care. This is a crucial point to keep in mind when opponents of universal health care assert that the health care systems in other countries ration health care. Our corporate health care system does, too, and at a vastly greater expense."