The Great American Jobs Scam

Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation

Greg LeRoy

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9781459626966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781609943516
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

For the past 20 years, corporations have been receiving huge tax breaks and subsidies in the name of "jobs, jobs, jobs." But, as Greg LeRoy demonstrates in this important new book, it's become a costly scam. Playing states and communities off against each other in a bidding war for jobs, corporations reduce their taxes to next-to-nothing and win subsidy packages that routinely exceed $100,000 per job. But the subsidies come with few strings attached. So companies feel free to provide fewer jobs, or none at all, or even outsource and lay people off. They are also free to pay poverty wages without health care or other benefits. All too often, communities lose twice. They lose jobs--or gain jobs so low-paying they do nothing to help the community--and lose revenue due to the huge corporate tax breaks. That means fewer resources for maintaining schools, public services, and infrastructure. In the end, the local governments that were hoping for economic revitalization are actually worse off. They're forced to raise taxes on struggling small businesses and working families, or reduce services, or both. Greg LeRoy uses up-to-the-minute examples, naming names--including Wal-Mart, Raytheon, Fidelity, Bank of America, Dell, and Boeing--to reveal how the process works. He shows how carefully corporations orchestrate the bidding wars between states and communities. He exposes shadowy "site location consultants" who play both sides against the middle, and he dissects government and corporate mumbo-jumbo with plain talk. The book concludes by offering common-sense reforms that will give taxpayers powerful new tools to deter future abuses and redirect taxpayer investments in ways that will really pay off.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Introduction: Money for Nothing
• Chapter One: The Tax Dodgers Are Coming! the Tax Dodgers Are Coming!
• Chapter Two: Site Location 101: How Companies Decide Where to Expand or Relocate
• Chapter Three: Fantus and the Rise of the Economic War Among the States
• Chapter Four: “Single Sales Factor” and the Corporate Assault On the Income Tax
• Chapter Five: Property Tax Abatements and Your Local School
• Chapter Six: Subsidizing Sprawl, Subsidizing Wal-Mart
• Chapter Seven: Loot, Loot, Loot for the Home Team
• Chapter 8: Shifting the Burden
• Chapter Nine: Building a New Consensus for Reform
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• About Berrett-Koehler Publishers
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