Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 15th hosted by Anastasia Global.

During fiscal year 2006, the federal government spent $92 billion on corporate welfare to cushion America's largest companies at the taxpayer's expense.

A new Cato study titled The Corporate Welfare State, how the federal government subsidizes

US businesses, details the scope and consequences of this corporate welfare state. The study's author is the In your study you refer to government handouts to corporations as corporate welfare.

Why do you use that terminology?

The phrase corporate welfare in some respect seems to imply that there's an annual payment of

money to certain corporations.

That's certainly true for some of the programs, in particular agricultural crop subsidies.

Those are payments that go to very wealthy farmers, mostly agribusinesses on an annual basis.

Other programs, however, that subsidize research and development for certain corporations,

those might be a multiple year grant that they get paid out in one year,

and then the company uses it over the course of the next four to five

years and so corporate welfare as a broad category includes all these sorts of programs

but the main point of course is that all of these programs subsidize or provide a unique

benefit to a corporation or an industry something that really shouldn't be a function of

the federal government in the first place.

And how large a chunk of taxpayer revenue goes to subsidies of this kind?

In fiscal 2006 the corporate welfare budget equaled 92 billion in federal taxpayer money.

Now that's in a universe of about 3 trillion in overall government expenditures.

So it does seem like a smaller portion of a much larger pie.

The point of course is that these are net expenditures from the federal budget.

There's portions of what I would consider

...