Senate Oks Subsidies To Promote Business Critics Say ‘Corporate Welfare’ Survives Amid Cuts For The Poor

In an irony of timing, the Senate decided Tuesday to retain subsidies that help huge corporations promote their products overseas, then voted to squeeze billions from welfare programs for the poor.

Neither vote was close.

“In part what we’re seeing here is a reflection of the fact that more than ever, political power and campaign contributions speak,” said Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

To members of the Senate, though, the juxtaposition was far more complicated, a blend of political considerations and home-state interests.

“This is not corporate welfare. This promotes jobs,” said Sen. Thad Cochran, the Mississippi Republican who led the fight to preserve the $110 million Market Protection Program, which benefits corporations such as McDonald’s, Pillsbury and Ernest & Julio Gallo.

“We’re trying to save American jobs,” he said. “We’re trying to promote American economic interests, American agricultural interests. These are companies that are involved in those businesses.”

The vote was 59-41 on that one, a spicy issue, perhaps, but one of literally dozens of votes that make up a year’s work.

A few hours later, Cochran joined most of his colleagues in both parties in voting for the welfare measure that would require as many as 1 million welfare recipients to go to work by 2000, imposes a five-year lifetime limit on each family’s cash benefits and ends the federal government’s guarantee to provide a subsistence income to millions of fatherless families.

With polls showing overwhelming support for fundamental change on welfare, the vote was a 87-12.

For Republicans, the importance of the moment was dramatized when a smiling Speaker Newt Gingrich and his lieutenants from the House traversed the Capitol to witness the final vote.

To Democrats, public disenchantment with “welfare as we know it” is so clear that President Clinton had all but endorsed the measure over the weekend. Democrats had wrung several concessions from Majority Leader Bob Dole on funding for child care and other issues as their price for passage.

In the end, only 11 of 46 Democrats voted against. Of them, just one - liberal first-termer Paul Wellstone of Minnesota - will be on the ballot next year. .Across the Capitol, Gingrich unveiled a plan to save $182 billion over seven years from Medicaid, the program that provides health care for the poor. Republicans also are drafting bills to cut the growth of Medicare by $270 billion over seven years, an effort they say is designed to save the program but Democrats say would lead to its destruction.

Democrats are likely to resist both fiercely, at least until Republicans make significant concessions.

The vote on the corporate subsidies produced its share of interesting moments.

Asked if the program was “corporate welfare,” as critics charged, Sen. Nancy Kassebaum, R-Kan., replied, “To a certain extent, if you’re completely honest, I suppose you could look at it that way.”

“But it’s a program that’s very important to Kansas,” she said.

Some Republicans decided deficit reduction took priority.

“If we’re going to be cutting back on welfare for people who are poor because it doesn’t work in helping then out of poverty, then we need to be cutting back on government largesse that I don’t think is effective,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, one of 22 Republicans voting to kill the program.

Democrats were similarly divided. Arkansas’ Dale Bumpers and Nevada’s Richard Bryan led the fight to kill the export subsidy.

But Sen. Barbara Boxer, a liberal Democrat from farm-rich California, voted to retain it.

“The economic future of this country really lies in exports,” she said. “That’s where we’re going to have the job creation, that is where were going to have an economic future that’s worth something.”