Good Jobs First Blog

In a guest column for the influential government performance website of Katherine Barrett and Richard Greene, the B & G Report, we argue that public officials have a strong self-interest in complying with GASB Statement 77 and in encouraging a smarter public debate over public spending priorities that will

Subsidy Tracker, the nation’s only public and free database of economic development incentive awards, today introduced a new feature that allows the user to display summary data for more than 10,000 different localities across the country. The summaries, like those previously provided for states, show subsidy totals and list the

By Gordon Lafer & Greg LeRoy

When the term “Rustbelt” was coined in the 1980s and activists learned the early warning signs of a plant closing, one of those indicators was tax dodging. If a company knew it was planning to close a factory, it would often challenge its property

Good Jobs First is happy to announce that our book-length explanation of how economic development in American became so corrupted is back online!

The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation is again free online, this time with an annotated Table of Contents.

As we await this year’s geyser of first-ever tax break data under GASB Statement 77*, Good Jobs First is especially keen to see how some “budget icebergs” will be revealed.

For example:

Michigan Economic Growth Authority (MEGA) tax breaks disrupted the state’s 2015 budget process when officials realized the true