Why should you, as a citizen, care about subsidies? After all, don't many subsidies serve useful purposes? Yes, they do. Subsidies enable children from poor families to attend higher education. They support research vital to developing new vaccines and predicting natural disasters. And they help unemployed people to learn new skills, or to relocate to areas with better job prospects.
But precisely because government expenditure is limited, citizens should care about subsidies if for no other reason than to ensure that they serve the public interest and not merely a private one. Nothing speaks louder about a government's actual intentions and activities than how it spends its money, your money.
A lawmaker may proclaim support for energy conservation, yet still vote for generous tax breaks to buyers of large, gas-guzzling vehicles. A president may lecture an international gathering on the importance of helping developing countries to export their way out of poverty, and later that same day approve a new subsidy that effectively blocks imports from those same countries.
The second reason to care about subsidies is that they can have profound and long-lasting effects on the economy, the distribution of income in society, and the environment, both at home and abroad. Subsidies have shaped the pattern and methods of agricultural production, even in countries that provide few or no farm subsidies. They have encouraged fishing fleets to search farther and deeper than ever before, aggravating the problem of over-fishing. They have fueled unsustainable energy production and consumption patterns.
And, most worryingly, they continue to do so.
