Good Jobs First Blog

September 29, 2017

Hundreds of local governments have already reported their tax revenue losses associated with corporate subsidies. In late July, the State of New York became the first state to do so, in their Basic Annual Report, a publication that precedes the state’s more comprehensive CAFR report

Good Jobs First executive director Greg LeRoy made the following statement concerning Amazon.com's announced search for a second corporate headquarters location.

"Taxpayers should watch their wallets as the trophy deal of the decade attracts politicians to a hyper-sophisticated tax-break auction. We fear that many states and localities will offer

by Jeremy Moses

Over the past few years, controversy around tax increment financing in St. Louis has been increasingly prominent in local politics. In the mayoral race earlier this year, each candidate put forward his or her own proposal for reform, in response to a growing consensus that incentives are

by Jennifer Morgan

Tracking how states provide incentives for economic development sometimes can be as simple as searching their online reporting platform. Localities, however, often make it difficult to find information on their subsidy recipients. They either require this data be accessed through an open records request, which is burdensome, or they bounce the request from department to department, and eventually decline to disclose.

It’s common for governors to stage publicity events to announce major job-creating investments in their state. This allows them to take implicit credit for a project that was probably helped along with tax breaks and other financial giveaways. When it came to the Taiwanese company Foxconn’s plan to build a $10 billion flat-screen plant in Wisconsin, the hype was taken to a new level.