Corporate welfare is often used to describe a government's bestowal of money grants, tax breaks, or other special favorable treatment for corporations.

Quotes

• The Pentagon will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years—that’s even more than Donald Trump asked for...The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year. Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon’s own expansive expectations.... The majority of Republican fiscal conservatives were thrilled to sign off on a Pentagon increase that, combined with the Trump tax cut for the rich, funds ballooning deficits as far as the eye can see—a total of $7.7 trillion worth of them over the next decade.
  • William D. Hartung, The Military-Industrial Complex Is on Corporate Welfare (February 27, 2018), The Nation

• The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global health, social and economic crisis. Historical comparisons are few, particularly in recent decades. This tragedy constitutes nothing less than a trial for all humanity. [...] The pandemic, in other words, is now testing the capacity of our political and economic systems to cope with a global problem situated at the level of our individual interdependence, which is to say at the very foundation of our social life. [...] We equally depend on the state to help businesses of all sizes endure this trial by providing them with the financial assistance and guaranteed loans they require in order to avoid bankruptcy and retain as much of their workforce as possible. States no longer have any qualms about spending without limits in order to save the economy ⁠— "whatever it takes!" ⁠— while just weeks ago states opposed any request to increase hospital staff, hospital beds, or emergency services, out of its obsessive concern for budgetary constraint and limiting the public debt. States have since rediscovered the virtues of interventionism, at least when it comes to funding private enterprise and shoring up the financial system.
  • Christian Laval, The pandemic as political trial: the case for a global commons (March 28, 2020), co-written with Pierre Dardot, ROAR Magazine

• The desperate policies of panic-driven governments involve throwing huge amounts of money at the economies collapsed in response to the coronavirus threat. Monetary authorities create money and lend it at extremely low interest rates to the major corporations and especially big banks "to get them through the crisis." Government treasuries borrow vast sums to get the collapsed economy back into what they imagine is "the normal, pre-virus economy." Capitalism's leaders are rushing into policy failures because of their ideological blinders.
  • Richard D. Wolff, COVID-19 and the Failures of Capitalism (April 6, 2020), CounterPunch.

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