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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (31634)	1/20/2009 3:37:49 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

A contract that serves to get needed or desired goods or services for the government isn't entirely corporate welfare even if its no bid, or earmarked. If we pay more because the lack of competition, or we pay a price in terms of lower performance on the contract (and presumably having at least one, and possibly both of these things happening would not be very rare when you have these contracts), then the value of the extra payment or lowered performance could be considered to be corporate welfare. If some (would be) $50mil government service contract goes for $75mil, because it goes to a crony of a senator without bid, then the $25mil would effectively be the same as corporate welfare. I might not call it corporate welfare, but I won't complain if you do, and the effect is the same. But the contract as a whole wouldn't be corporate welfare. And yes I recognize that you can't know exactly what the contract would have gone for with competitive bidding, so any measurement of this type of corporate benefit would be imprecise, but a guess would still be closer than just counting the whole contract. Also with more difficulty you might be able to add in the additional expense caused by contracts that are put out for bid, but are intentionally structured so as to artificially limit competition.