Good Jobs First Blog

I’ve seen it time and time again: A gushing press release, with quotes by local elected officials and business lobbyists, enthusiastically touting all the benefits Amazon’s presence will bring. The accompanying media write-up is often a fuller version of the release that, because of time constraints or unfamiliarity with the bigger picture, completely leaves out the company’s harmful side effects.

When it came to funding education, the CARES Act favored private and charter schools over public schools in a big way. An analysis by Good Jobs First previously revealed that private and charter schools received about six times more per school than public schools: $855,000 per facility on average compared to $134,500 for public schools.

Good Jobs First’s latest tally of economic development subsidies given to Amazon.com finds state and local governments have given the retail behemoth more than $3.7 billion. How much more is becoming increasingly hard to tell.

More than 190,000 American workers have been laid off since March across 1,900 companies that received loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The companies intended to support 251,000 workers – instead, they laid off 76 percent of them. About one in eight of those workers lost their jobs permanently.

South Carolina is a state that’s given large subsidies to big companies – Boeing, Michelin, Volvo, Continental Tire, Google to name a few – and it’s also been one of the worst in the country when it comes to revealing the full costs of those deals.