And I would include professional sports franchises in the same category. Corporations, billionaire professional sports franchise owners and the scummy "relocation consultant" industry they have spawned pit U.S. states and municipalities against each other in a prisoner's dilemma to see which set of taxpayers can offer them the biggest subsidies to do what they were in most cases going to do anyway.
I think this should be addressed at the federal level with legislation making it illegal for states and municipalities to offer special incentives for particular relocation deals. I read that Obama discussed such a proposal at some point but presume he didn't follow through. Bernie should add it to his platform.
Here is a link to a story on the recent relocation of General Electric's headquarters from Fairfield, CT to the Boston, MA area. As part of the more than $120 million in subsidies, Massachusetts taxpayers ended up paying for the personal relocation expenses of GE CEO Jeff Immelt, who I would estimate has made at least $300 million in compensation over the last 15 years, and for other GE executives. This is while Massachusetts, like most states, faces budget problems and is cutting services to the poor.
http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-malloy-and-ge-20160114-story.html
<Malloy said that the state had offered GE "a lot,'' but he and others declined to elaborate, in light of the state's policy of keeping financial incentives confidential. Massachusetts is offering GE more than $120 million in incentives, plus tax breaks and assistance to pay for executives' relocation from Connecticut.>
Here's an article on the corporate welfare that helps build new sports stadiums for their owners who are part of the top 0.01%. It focuses only on the cost to the U.S. government of allowing municipalities to issue tax exempt bonds to fund these stadiums and doesn't even get into the much greater subsidies provided by local taxpayers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-05/in-stadium-building-spree-u-s-taxpayers-lose-4-billion
<Jones is one of dozens of wealthy owners whose big-league teams benefit from millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. Michael Jordan’s Charlotte, North Carolina, Bobcats basketball team plays in a municipal bond-financed stadium, the Time Warner Cable Arena, where the Democratic Party is meeting this week. The Republicans last week used Florida’s Tampa Bay Times Forum, also financed with tax-exempt debt. It is the home of hockey’s Lightning, owned by hedge-fund manager Jeffrey Vinik. None of the owners who responded would comment.>
<Tax exemptions on interest paid by muni bonds that were issued for sports structures cost the U.S. Treasury $146 million a year, based on data compiled by Bloomberg on 2,700 securities. Over the life of the $17 billion of exempt debt issued to build stadiums since 1986, the last of which matures in 2047, taxpayer subsidies to bondholders will total $4 billion, the data show.
Those estimates are based on what the Treasury could have collected on interest from the same amount of taxable bonds sold at the same time to investors in the 25 percent income-tax bracket, the rate many government agencies assume. In fact, more than half the owners of tax-exempt bonds pay top rates of at least 30 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. So they save even more on their income taxes, a system that U.S. lawmakers of both parties and President Barack Obama have described as inefficient and unfair.>
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