This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 23rd, 2022. I'm Caleb Brown. Take a bow everyone.

2022 may have been the worst year for corporate handouts in American history. That from John Mosina

president of the Center for Economic Accountability, he says big pandemic

spending and a few other factors have led state governments to deal with a flood of cash to government coffers

by giving it away to corporate friends in the form of beautifully wrapped piles of subsidies.

We spoke in October.

The federal government, you may have heard, spent a huge amount of money in 2020 and a huge amount

of money in 2021, well above trend.

Is that, does that have anything to do with explaining corporate subsidies and why they're so high?

Absolutely. I mean I've heard it straight from state legislators who have basically, you know, in the past we were able to sort of make

claims of poverty, we were able to say, well, we just don't have the money to do this, we can't

afford this. Like we can't have the money to do this we can't afford this. We can't do the we can't

afford this argument anymore or at least not right now because there's just too much

money sloshing around in the budget and we're just looking for places to spend it.

So the floodgates have opened and then you tack on to that the fact that there's a whole lot of people

up for re-election.

We've known for some time that these deals

spike before elections, that states where

governors are running for re-election

are twice as likely to see a large 20% or more jump in subsidy

spending than those where they're not. And add on to that the sort of

weird fill up of the fact that it's a first post-census redistricting.

...