It’s tax season! You know what that means? It’s time for your crazy Tea Party relatives to start complaining about paying taxes.
Get ready for them to scream about Obamacare and how we’re all turning into communists. And let’s not forget about Ronald Reagan’s infamous welfare queen, Linda Taylor. She’s the woman who used fake IDs and fake addresses to get multiple checks from the government totaling $150,000 a year.
And since one woman in Chicago did this back in 1976, every single person on welfare is clearly rigging the system.
They’re using money for weed and meth. They’re lazy burdens on society who don’t work, and they’re sucking America dry. They take taxpayers’ money and buy expensive cars and phones.
How dare you have food stamps and an iPhone 6? Is that last season’s Prada bag? It better be a knock-off! You can’t be on government assistance and dress well. If you don’t look poor, you don’t deserve to eat or have air conditioning.
However, after looking more closely at Louisiana’s welfare program, this “welfare queen” stereotype is not exactly the reality.
First of all, you can’t use your cash benefits for anything other than food, shelter and clothing. Jewelry, liquor, casinos, porn, sex toys, strip clubs, nail salons, tattoos, piercings, movie theaters, arcades, bail bonds companies, night clubs, bars, cruises and psychic businesses are specifically banned. So everything fun is basically off limits.
If you’re caught using welfare money for any of those goods, you’ll lose your benefits. After your first offense, the state takes away your money for one year. After your second offense, two years. After your third offense, Louisiana takes away your benefits forever.
Secondly, you can only get welfare for 5 years in one lifetime.
If you’re eligible to work, then you generally have to work. If you don’t work, then you better be either in school or taking care of someone disabled. 
If you’re not doing any of those things, they take away your welfare money, and your Medicaid and food stamps might be affected, too.
Finally, you hardly get any money. For a family of four, the maximum grant is $284 a month. Most, however, don’t get the maximum grant.
Louisiana’s program subtracts a family’s monthly income from the grant amount. The remaining balance is how much assistance a family receives.
If this is how queens live, then I don’t want to be gay anymore.
America’s real “welfare queens” take much more from Uncle Sam than the pennies taken by poverty-stricken families. 
They’re called corporations, and they take billions of dollars away from the government in the form of tax breaks and delayed payments.
Under American law, corporations can defer tax payments on any income made offshore.
Students can’t refinance their loans, but apparently corporations can put off paying taxes indefinitely.
Can you imagine if you didn’t pay taxes? Imagine what the Internal Revenue Service would do if you just told them you’re deferring your taxes indefinitely. They would laugh at you. But it’s perfectly fine for Verizon to defer its taxes.
The other way corporations are able to evade taxes is by writing off expenses. Equipment, inventory, stocks and other business expenses can be deducted and used as a tax break. 
And through a weird and complicated loophole, these expenses depreciate, which makes many corporations look like they lost money, so the government gives them tax subsidies.
There’s no limit to the subsidies. CEOs aren’t drug-tested for the corporate welfare. And companies can use the money on pretty much anything they want.
Essentially, more money goes toward helping corporations turn a profit than getting families off the streets. 
It’s unfair and unjust to give corporations more handouts than people. I shouldn’t have to subsidize companies like Ford or Verizon when there are still homeless and starving people in the world.
Cody Sibley is a 19-year-old mass communication freshman from Opelousas, Louisiana. You can reach him on Twitter at @CodySibley.