This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 12th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. The U.S. devotes $100 billion a year to corporate welfare.

Scott Linsicum, an international trade attorney,

and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute

argues that the distortions to our economy

caused by those subsidies take that price tag far higher.

On an annual basis, how much does the United States spend on corporate welfare?

It's around $100 billion per year and that's up significantly just from 90 billion a couple years ago.

So I'm looking at Department of Agriculture 1.2 billion marketing, the total Department of Agriculture, 25 billion, rural utility service, 1.3 billion.

What is the price that we pay other than that $100 billion price tag? Well it's severalfold.

The issue is just the domestic distortions caused by all of the different subsidies we have in place.

For example, raisin price supports.

You may have heard of our raisin program.

Actually, keep raisins off the market and raise prices forcing consumers

to pay higher prices and of course indirectly subsidize the industry.

Sugar is another example of this. This not only leads to higher prices and paying for consumers,

it leads to a lot of resource misallocation,

where farmers are encouraged by the subsidies to farm crops that they might not otherwise farm.

And thus we see a lot of corn over production and of course then we see a lot of corn in our food and a lot of corn in our fuel

tanks and a lot of this is driven by the federal government policies and of course

it's not just agriculture energy Energy is another really good example of this where we see a rampant

subsidization of green energy in the last few years, totaling tens of billions of dollars and of course that leads to distortions in

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