US government for the rich or for the poor - Essay Example

The expository by Valdas Anelauskas regarding the state of social affairs in the United States free market economy reveals several facts that profoundly try to establish that the US government is serving the interest of the rich while working against the poor.Central to X's arguments is the idea that US formulated tax laws are providing corporations opportunities to make enormous profits all the while pushing employees further into the quagmire of poverty and hopelessness.US economic policy is akin to providing business entities with benefits that are collectively called corporate welfare which I have learned upon further reading.

This welfare consists of government programs that extend unique advantages or benefits to specific industries or companies. Corporate welfare includes direct grants to businesses, indirect commercial support to businesses and subsidized loans and insurance. These programs provide useful services to private industry such as research, insurance, statistics, loans, and marketing support. In addition to spending programs, corporate welfare also includes barriers to trade that protect U.S. industries from foreign competition.

The logic behind giving corporations such benefits is the hope that they will remain competitive in the local and global marketplace thereby ensuring the labor force with employment with the possibility of providing more because of the availability of more capital. Anelauskas provides many statistics on US tax disparities between the rich and the poor but the more telling one is corporate benefits amounting to $165 billion as opposed to the $50 billion given for social welfare (p. 283). Anelauskas reveals that the perceived benefits of the corporate welfare to the labor force did not materialize.

It turns out that while corporations have slashed their taxes thru the different provisions of the law, they are actually using the money saved and even the subsidies received to enrich their top-ranking officials particularly the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). The result is that CEOs are earning huge amounts of money that are hundreds and even thousands of times larger than what the average employee would earn. Instead of ensuring employment security and providing more employment opportunities, US corporations are actually conducting mass lay-offs on a grand scale and their CEOs even get paid with huge amounts of money for conducting such operations.

Instead of the benefits of improved employment, US workers now face the possibility of employment termination more than ever, the decreasing availability of health and retirement benefits and lower compensation. Making matters worse is that while corporations are paying less and earning more, individuals are paying more to account for the void left by the corporate tax cuts but are earning less. What is more undesirable is that individual taxpayer's money goes to corporate bank accounts. Aneulaskas argues that it is thru the actions of the US government that made this state of affairs possible.

The US government even acts as a passive observer to the mass lay-offs and the scam of huge pay-offs that make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Is Aneulaskas right in claiming that the US government are actually serving the interests of the rich It is important to remember that the main basis why the US government formulated these give-aways to corporations is to help them stay financially viable in a rapidly globalizing marketplace. The US government would not want these corporations to go bankrupt or relocate their production and manufacturing facilities in countries with cheap labor and have their own labor force having little employment opportunities.

Can we say therefore that the US government is not actually helping the rich but are actually more concerned with those of the average and meagre incomes I would have believed that such is the case if it were not for the obliviousness of the US govern