Good Jobs First is a national policy resource center has recently developed Subsidy Tracker as the first national search engine for economic development subsidies and other forms of government financial assistance to business. Subsidy Tracker lets individuals find out how much their state and community are losing to corporate subsidies. It collects data that governmental bodies across the United States are reporting in accordance with a new accounting rule adopted by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). GASB Statement 77 requires governments that employ Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to report on the aggregate amount of annual tax revenue they are losing as a result of tax abatements.
One recent example from Louisiana shows the state’s industrial tax exemption program allowed Exxon Mobil to gradually lose nearly 2,000 jobs while receiving tax cuts worth almost $700 million over 20 years. Subsidy Tracker has data on over a thousand government subsidy programs and nearly 600,000 subsidy award entries, including megadeals and the US government’s favorite corporations for subsidies based on federal data. (Good Jobs First, 2017, https://www.goodjobsfirst.org)
Sustainable Practices 2017 is a weekly information service that has been highlighting innovations in technology, social and governance models, and sustainable best practices since 2000. It is compiled from publicly available sources and is provided by David Schaller in Tucson, Arizona, 1-520-665-1767, daschaller@me.com; for archives of past issues and quotes see http://www.sustainablepractices.info