 A lot of Republicans, conservatives, they continue to accuse Democrats and progressives of being socialists. Socialist shopping lists. Radical socialist views. They want to ram through their socialist vision for this country. But in fact, the irony is that corporate welfare is a form of socialism. It's socialism for the rich. Corporate welfare is a lot of subsidies and tax breaks and all sorts of special privileges going to corporations. Large corporations in the United States are now paying a fraction of the taxes that they were paying 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. And why is that? Because they've got the lobbyists and because they have a tremendous infrastructure of influencers. Our politics become essentially transactional. You know, you give me campaign contributions and I will give you tax subsidies, tax loopholes, special privileges. It's a form of corruption of our economic system. Corporate welfare costs American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The biggest corporate welfare in America is where? It's on Wall Street in terms of the too big to fail banks. It's in the pharmaceutical industry in terms of the huge amounts of basic research and development that taxpayers pay for. High tech, you see the same thing. The Department of Defense just decided that Amazon would get the gigantic contract for cloud computing for the Department of Defense or take the war in Afghanistan and just look at military contractors like Boeing. Boeing spent about $16.7 billion on lobbying in 2017 and won a $23.4 billion contract from the Defense Department. Oh, and their tax rate was only about 8.4%. Isn't that corporate welfare? We are providing all sorts of benefits for people at the very top, CEOs, major investors. The typical CEO today is making 320 times what the typical worker is making. We haven't seen that ratio, that extreme ratio since the 1920s. I mean, you've got these big corporations, they are just riding the stock market up. The public is paying for this. They have even convinced a big portion of the public that you don't want to tax corporations because that would, what, stymie innovation, that would stymie the economy? Well, that's baloney. It also keeps big companies fat and happy, makes it difficult for smaller competitors to get in. It reduces the number of startups in terms of the economy because these big players get so many benefits that the small competitors really don't even have a chance. Corporate welfare clearly is a form of socialism for the rich. These people at the top are not responsible. There's no accountability. This is the worst form of socialism.