Politicians don’t care about small business

No public debate

Given how incessantly politicians intone about “small business” and how much of the presidential campaign and debates have been about taxes, spending and proposals to narrowly redefine what is appropriate government policy by slashing programs for the old, poor and sick, you might think the study would have made lots of news when it was released last month.  Sadly, the diversion of tax dollars that the report “Shortchanging Small Business” documents was largely ignored by our major news organizations.

Good Jobs First tells me it reached out to more than a dozen reporters at The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters news services as well as five reporters and two columnists at The New York Times, four writers at The Washington Post, two at USA Today, five at NPR and Marketplace radio and many more.           

Coverage? None from the news outlets listed above except for an AP story out of Kansas based on a report in a local business paper.

How many people know that they are being taxed to give billions of dollars to big companies from Apple and Starwood hotels to General Motors, Hyundai and Volkswagen, with bank vaults of public cash going to Alcoa and Boeing.    

Funny how the candidates hardly talk about business subsidies, especially since one of them has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate welfare.

But the studied silence by the candidates, and especially the welfare-collecting Donald Trump, may reflect just who benefits these days from public money put to private benefit. Among the beneficiaries are CBS, Comcast, Disney and Fox, parent companies of the television outlets sponsoring various of the debates, leaving them open to challenge if their journalists ask questions about subsidies.

It’s not just the big businesses that benefit. It’s the politicians, too. When they leave office, those who helped give away your tax dollars often land lucrative jobs in subsidized industries.