Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner was a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal the other day, and he quite likely gained some new fans from fiscal conservatives who have grown dissatisfied with the Republican party.
A caller complained about corporate subsidies, and what follows is a homemade transcript of Mr. Carney's answer:
Corporate welfare should be the easiest target for Republicans to go after. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate welfare that the congress lays out over the decades. That they've got government agencies explicitly set up to subsidize corporations. The Export Import Bank is one of them, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the research and development tax credits or windmill tax credits that really take the form of checks directly to companies like General Electric and [unintelligible]. And say "look, this stuff is corporate welfare," and we are going to end and make the Democrats stand up for, well, the reason we need to give these checks to General Electric, who spends more on lobbying than any other company, is because it's good for the -- make the Democrats defend their corporate welfare.
Republicans could gain some populist points as well as burnish their image of trying to cut spending. So I agree with you, I think the fact that the Republicans are basically leaving them alone shows they might be closer to their K Street friends than conservative principles .
Emphasis added. Watch the show here. The portion transcribed begins at about the 29 minute mark.
He could have thrown farm subsidies in there too. But what are the odds that the old guard Republicans would consider serious reform? Not high when there is so much money at stake, and that's a simply explanation for why so many voters want new people representing them.
In the meantime, we'll have to wait for the required fund raising report to find out how much money Texas District 11 Representative Mike Conaway reeled in from his fund raiser in Washington D.C. last week.
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