Myers and Kent also tell us that the total of perverse subsidies is almost as big as the GNP of Germany; almost three times as large as global military spending per year; larger than the annual sales of the twenty largest corporations; four times as much as the annual cash incomes of the 1.3 billion poorest people; five times as much as the international narcotics industry; and half again as large as the global fossil-fuels industry or the global insurance industry. In a nutshell, they are large and no incidental part of the world economy. Examples of these subsidies include subsidies for fossil fuels, road construction, tobacco growing, and all forms of resource extraction, particularly mining and logging. They can take a variety of forms: direct subsidies, expressed in tax breaks, free or cheap land and other public resources, regulatory exemptions, and special financing. Or they can be more indirect, as in the case of extraction industries that are permitted to impose the costs of environmental damage on communities, neighbouring property owners, local governments, downstream water users, etc. Gardner and Sampat (1998, p.31) describe the use of tax policy to subsidize extraction at the expense of recycling: In Canada, for example, taxes are shifted away from virgin materials producers and away from disposaland shifted onto recyclers. Indeed, tax rates for recycled material are on average 27 percent compared to 24 percent for virgin material, resulting in a $367 million (Canadian) disadvantage to the recycling industry. Unless the structural biases against recycling are uprooted, expanding recycling programs simply worsens the glut of secondary material and depresses prices further. According to Myers and Kent (2001, p. 191), All in all, a typical American taxpayer is paying at least $2,000 a year to fund subsidies that undercut both the nations