Mr. corporate welfare.

The Republican plan, snickers GOP-bashing commentator Kevin Phillips, savages federal programs that help "the elderly, the working poor, and college kids," while providing "candy-corn treats and chocolate kisses for Corporate Welfare Kings." The Washington Post agrees, calling federal subsidies to big business "the pork that won't slice." In the GOP budget, the paper declares, "Everything gets cut -- but not corporate welfare."

Yet when the media condemn corporate welfare as "GOP pork," they get the story only half right -- at best. That the Republican record in cutting taxpayer subsidies to big business has been disappointing is true enough. By and large, however, notwithstanding the laissez-faire rhetoric, the record of liberal Democrats has been worse.

Corporate welfare has its origins in the New Deal. Many of the corporate-aid programs that the Left seems so eager to purge from the federal budget today -- the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Rural Electrification Administration, the Export - Import Bank, subsidized deposit insurance for banks, farm price-support programs -- are vestiges of FDR's 1930s-style socialism. The second great cornucopia of corporate statism was LBJ's Great Society. His list of oinkers includes the Economic Development Administration, and public-housing, public-works, and mass-transit programs that have done little to help the poor but a great deal to create wealth for the construction industry. The military - industrial complex that Ike warned of in 1961 pales in comparison to the legacy of the Great Society and its aftermath: a half-trillion-dollar-a-year social-policy - industrial complex.

And what of the tax code? How did it become so polluted with ethanol subsidies for Archer Daniels Midland, tax write-offs for bull sperm and windmills, low-income-housing credits for slumlords, and other gaudy paybacks to corporate political givers? Newt Gingrich had it about right when confronted at a recent press conference on the issue of corporate pork in the tax code. "Liberals have spent forty years building up the corporate welfare state," he shot back. "Republicans shouldn't be expected to dismantle it in 18 months."

True, but the relentless attacks would not sting so much if Republicans at least chiseled out more bricks. My colleague Dean Stansel and I calculated back in March that Uncle Sam doles out $80 billion each year in unwarranted direct cash subsidies to business. The spending subsidies range from high-tech-R&D handouts for companies like General Electric, AT&T, and Chevron, to export assistance to companies like Boeing and General Electric, to billions of dollars of peanut, sugar, wool, and mohair price supports to multi-million-dollar agribusinesses. Get rid of all this sludge and you could cut the budget deficit in half or alternatively almost pay for the abolition of the entire corporate income tax.

Some of the corporate slurpees retained this year are downright embarrassments to a party allegedly dedicated to shrinking the size of the state. For example, supposed deficit hawk Pete Domenici granted a stay of execution to Jimmy Carter's long-defunct Department of Energy -- now a grand repository of energy-related handouts to big business, many of which happen to be located in New Mexico. All that stands between American consumers and lower milk and cottage-cheese prices at the grocery store is House Rules Committee chairman Gerry Solomon, who wants to raise price supports for marginally competitive upstate New York dairy farmers.

Meanwhile, the poster child of corporate welfare, the $100-million-a-year USDA Marketing Promotion Program -- which underwrites overseas advertising for the Pillsbury Dough Boy, Dole pineapples and lemons, and Ernest and Julio Gallo cabernets -- was actually rewarded with a 20 percent budget hike for 1996. How's this for providing ammunition to the enemy? While the GOP wisely voted for a two-year time limit for families on Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the MPP allows corporations five years before they are nudged out of the safety net. Yet if the GOP is selling votes, it's selling them awfully cheap: but of the enormous $80-billion industry slush fund, the GOP extracted less than $10 billion in 1995.

In any case, it turns out that the single greatest obstacle to tearing down the walls of the corporate welfare state today is not Gerry Solomon, or Pete Domenici, or Bob Dole, but -- Bill Clinton.

Time and again the Clintonites have foiled congressional Republicans' attempts to shrink business subsidies. A prime example is the Department of Commerce -- Washington's command-and-control center for doling out corporate aid, with 102 programs and 36,000 bureaucrats. Republican freshmen tried valiantly to shut down the agency, but they eventually were derailed by a massive lobbying campaign orchestrated by Clinton's Commerce Secretary Ron Brown (who set up a "war room" to fend off the GOP assault). Brown protested that shutting down the agency would be "tantamount to unilateral disarmament in the global economy." And he continues to allege that his trade-promotion activities "helped businesses win export contracts worth almost $25 billion supporting more than 300,000 jobs." If we only had ten more Ron Browns, America's trade deficit and unemployment would presumably vanish.

In June 1994 Clinton imposed new mandates for ethanol in gasoline, maintaining that the corn-based fuel substitute "would create thousands of new jobs for the future" and protect "our environment, our public health, and our farmers." Every scientific analysis, and every public-interest group on the Left and the Right, agrees that these claims are entirely fatuous. This was a blatant political payoff. As the New York Times editorialized: What the Clinton Administration's "new rule will do is take money from consumers and taxpayers and hand it over to Archer Daniels Midland." Why the special favors for ADM's CEO, Wayne Andreas? Investigative reporter James Bovard finds that ADM and related interests gave $50,000 in contributions to the Democrats days before the 1992 election; some $300,000 in soft-money contributions to the Democratic Party in the first 18 months of the Clinton Administration; and nearly $500,000 to Democratic candidates in the run-up to the 1994 elections (compared to $325,000 for Republicans). In this Administration, the contributions have yielded a rich harvest.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich is now furiously backpedaling from the challenge he issued to Republicans a year ago to cut aid to dependent corporations. Mr. Reich explained in the Wall Street Journal recently that it wasn't corporate welfare per se but "corporate subsidies without broader public benefit," that were bad. The Clintonites want a "cost - benefit" test to be applied to business subsidies. That seems reasonable, but the White House hasn't yet identified a single subsidy that fails the test.

If there were any lingering doubts about President Clinton's allegiance to the corporate welfare state, his veto of the GOP budget should have put them to rest. He announced in his fifty-page veto message that he is opposed to virtually every dollar of the meager corporate-welfare cuts in the GOP budget. For example, the Republicans aim to terminate something called the Advanced Technology Program -- a Clinton Administration invention that gift-wraps nearly a half-billion dollars a year in $5-million "grants" to high-tech firms. A cynic might say that the ATP techno-pork is Clinton's way of reciprocating Silicon Valley's generous financial support of his 1992 campaign. (Understandably, the IBMs and GEs of the world loudly sing the program's praises.) Everything that is detrimental about corporate welfare -- particularly the parasitic relationship between government and industry -- is embodied in the ATP. Yet next to Americorps, this is Clinton's most beloved program.

Later in his veto message Clinton lists as unacceptable GOP cuts in agriculture price supports (the "farm safety net"), export-assistance programs, subsidies to industrial R&D, and 1970s-style alternative-energy programs. The Left may be correct in saying that the GOP's corporate-welfare cutbacks add up to a paltry sum. But Clinton is opposed to every penny of those paltry savings.

The lesson of this past year's assault on the budget is that K Street industry lobbyists can breathe a deep sigh of relief: as long as Bill Clinton remains in the White House the corporate social safety net will remain intact.