If the idea of Gordon Wilson, Ujjal Dosanjh, Paul Ramsey and Glen Clark investing your money would keep you up at night, don't read any further. They've already played high stakes poker with your tax dollars, and the losses rival Las Vegas gamblers with too much liquor.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation recently released a 53-page report on business loans and loan guarantees (aka: corporate welfare) in the ministries of Employment & Investment (EI) and Small Business, Tourism & Culture (SBTC). Using Freedom of Information laws to claw the data from government, we wanted to know how taxpayer loans and guarantees were performing.

Over the past fifteen years, Employment & Investment lent out or guaranteed $459 million worth of loans. $27.2 million worth of taxpayer's money was written off and another $104 million is forecast to be lost for a total (past and future) hit of $131.2 million. That's 29 percent of the total loan portfolio, or about 30 to 70 times the loss rates at the major banks.

Only slightly less costly are the losses at Small Business, though luckily their loan programs are now kaput. $2.4 million has already been flushed, while the ministry forecasts another $2.8 million in belly-ups for a total $5.2 million loss to taxpayers: 10 percent of the money lent out. SB's loan loss rate is seven to 20 times higher than that at real banks.

So given that BC's politicians are so poor at picking winners and losers, why do they engage in unsafe subsidies Proponents argue corporate welfare creates (or saves) jobs and expands the economy. Too bad for Mssrs Wilson, Dosanjh, Ramsey (and Glen Clark, who once elegantly described how the NDP were "shoveling money off the back of a truck,") that there is no evidence to support this view.

Professor Terry Buss of Suffolk University recently reviewed the studies that argue corporate welfare "works." He found that those studies - usually paid for by industries or politicians lobbying for subsidies - fail to counter the growing body of evidence that costly incentives to retain, attract, or expand business do not significantly influence the location or growth of economic activity.

Buss found that studies that justify U.S. corporate welfare programs are based on poor data, use unsound evaluative methods, and contain faulty economic reasoning. (Funny how that sounds like a match for the BC government's economic strategies.) Buss found that even when proponents point to apparent successes, the underlying economic assumptions in such pro-corporate welfare studies are so seriously flawed, that the benefits are illusory. And for every illusory success, there are mountains of costly failures.

So why do politicians - especially NDPers who used to be solidly against this nonsense - love corporate welfare Purely for political reasons. Subsidies for business allow MLAs to take credit for addressing important publics concerns, say, the possible loss of a plant. Photo-ops allow a politician to look like they're "doing something," even when what's truly needed - balanced budgets, lower taxes, a simplified tax system and less red tape - goes largely undone.

The $136 million that was (or will be) lost through BC corporate welfare is actually even more costly. Properly invested at conservative interest rates over the past decade and a half, that money - taken from taxpayers or borrowed from the bond market over the past 15 years - would be worth $377 million today. That's money that could have bought MRI machines for hospitals or been used for debt reduction. Some, but not all of these corporate welfare programs were started by the Socreds in the 1980s. The NDP were once, properly, against corporate welfare. They should return to that principled stand once again.