One rare exception was a speech by Labor Secretary Robert Reich last November to the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist Democratic Party group that launched Bill Clinton's national career. The White House distanced itself from Reich's speech in a hurry, and Clinton has yet to be heard uttering the infamous phrase. But activists picked it up with a vengeance, and not just the Ralph Nader types. Judging from the fact that neither the Congress nor the White House has made much of corporate welfare in their budget-balancing plans, hopes for such changes seem dim at best. But Nader keeps bringing up the subject, noting that if nothing else, its mention always seems to cause an embarrassed silence among politicians and lobbyists, and other insiders.
Corporate welfare comes in two forms and many variations.
One is the active form. There are giveaways of minerals on federal lands, there are giveaways of computer databases. Then there's the passive corporate welfare, which are the tax breaks, the loopholes. There are dozens of those, they make up about half the tax code. One example is that foreign corporations don't pay many taxes at all.