Comments Guidelines

All comments are pre-moderated. No spam, slurs, personal attacks, or foul language will be allowed.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

The new era for subsidy disclosure begins

Yesterday, December 15, was the first day the new Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) subsidy reporting rules came into effect. From now on, every state and local government's annual financial reports will be required to report on tax subsidies they give, or even simply lose revenue to (say, a school district losing revenue to a city-granted property tax abatement). This will be the biggest increase in subsidy transparency in the 20-odd years I have been studying the issue.

Good Jobs First's Greg LeRoy put it well: "In the history of incentive reform, it is no exaggeration to refer to Before 77 and After 77. When this new data starts flowing in 2017, we will finally have a price tag on corporate welfare like never before." As I told GASB in my comments in January, this could put me out of the business of estimating corporate subsidies, and that would be a great thing because we would have really useful data comparable across states and cities.

With good data, we could finally make inroads into important questions, starting with whether investment incentives work -- in the sense that governments which give more incentives have something concrete to show for it in terms of unemployment rates, income, or poverty reduction. This is a question Richard Florida has tried to answer using Louise Story's New York Times subsidy database, but with weak data it's hard to be confident in statistical results. But now we stand on the brink of having good data.

Of course, we will have to wait until late 2017 to get it, since most government fiscal years will end June 30, 2017. But I think we are entitled to a partial celebration now.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

New Study Finds State Subsidies Go Overwhelmingly to Large Companies

Good Jobs First has just issued a new report analyzing state investment incentive programs open to small and large businesses alike. With the financial support of the Surdna Foundation and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Shortchanging Small Business: How Big Businesses Dominate State Economic Development Incentives finds that 70% of the awards and 90% of the money goes to large companies. This is a big deal: The justification for many major incentive programs is that they benefit small business. This study is the first in a planned series of reports which show that this claim does not stand up.

If subsidy programs disproportionately benefit large businesses, they reduce market competition and thereby make the economy less efficient. As I discussed in Competing for Capital, subsidies to capital exacerbate income inequality (post-tax, post-subsidy). This effect will be magnified if the incentives are flowing primarily to large firms rather than smaller ones, as this new study suggests to be the case. The report's findings are relevant to the European Commission's ruling last week on Starbucks and Fiat, that subsidies created by tax havens harm the ability of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to compete.

Shortchanging Small Business looks at 15 incentive programs in 13 states that are well-documented in Good Jobs First's Subsidy Tracker database, plus one Missouri program that is highly transparent online (and will soon be included in Subsidy Tracker), for a total of 16 programs in 14 states. Overall, these programs account for 4228 individual awards allocating over $3.2 billion.

Note that these are not one-off deals for a large company: For example, as I showed in my special report on North Carolina incentive packages, the deal Google received from the state in 2007 was worth $140.6 million at present value to the company. This dwarfs the $26.4 million over six years given by the One NC Fund, included in this Good Jobs First report, and is only one of a number of megadeals in North Carolina.

Moreover, neither are they apparently open programs with criteria that in fact rule out small companies through the use of large job creation or investment requirements. No, the 16 programs considered in this report are all genuinely available to large and small firms alike; that is what makes this such an important study. This report excludes programs directed solely to small businesses, but Good Jobs First has promised a separate analysis of those generally poorly funded measures.

What, then, is a small company? For the purposes of this study, it has to have fewer than 100 employees, it has to be an independently owned local firm, and it must have fewer than 10 establishments. If a company does not meet all three criteria, it is classified as a large company. Note that this cutoff is considerably below that of the U.S. Small Business Administration, which for most industries is 500 employees. On the other hand it is larger than the European Union definition of a small enterprise (50 workers) but smaller than the EU definition of a medium-sized enterprise (250 workers).

Despite the fact that small companies are theoretically eligible for the 16 programs analyzed, they receive only 30% of the awards and 10% of the money available through them. As I pointed out earlier, combined with one-off megadeals, programs that only appear to be open to small firms, and tiny programs specifically for small business, this adds up to a large bias in favor of big business, with all the consequences noted above.

What should be done? The report notes that many small businesses cannot benefit from the tax credit or tax abatement involved in the programs analyzed and, in a separate survey, many small business leaders said they would benefit more from public goods like job training, education, and transportation. Therefore, Good Jobs First proposes a reduction in incentive spending going to large companies, to be effected by using hard caps on each program's spending, on cost per job, and on the total amount any one company can receive under a given subsidy policy. While such caps are unusual in the United States, they are the main basis for the European Union's successful control over incentive spending there, elaborated further to have higher caps in poorer regions and a cap of 0 in the richest EU regions. In addition, the caps proposed by Good Jobs First could be augmented by using an EU metric known as aid intensity, which is simply the subsidy divided by the investment. While a cost per job cap is useful at resisting excessive capital intensity, an aid intensity cap is a valuable metric when substantial jobs are created but the government is paying for virtually the entire cost of the project (for example, Electrolux in Memphis).

I'm looking forward to further extensions of this research, and you should, too.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Thursday, October 22, 2015

EU slams Starbucks and Fiat advance tax rulings as state aid; Is Apple next?

The European Commission decided two of its major tax subsidy cases on Wednesday, October 21, and the rulings could not have been worse for Starbucks and Fiat (h/t Chillin' Competition). These cases can be seen as a barometer of what is to come in the legally similar but much larger case of Apple, where potentially billions of euros could be at stake.

The gist of the three cases is that tax haven subsidiaries of each company (Starbucks in the Netherlands, Fiat in Luxembourg, and Apple in Ireland) were given advance tax rulings by each country that were so removed from economic reality as to constitute illegal subsidies ("state aid" in Euro-speak) under EU competition law. In the Commission's decision, it was emphasized that the artificially low tax bills created by the rulings gave them an unfair competitive advantage over competitors, especially small business ("small and medium-sized enterprises" or "SMEs" in Euro-terminology).

Since the alleged subsidies were not notified to the European Commission in advance as required by EU law, the Commission has ruled that Starbucks and Fiat have to repay the illegal aid to the granting countries, with interest. The decision states that each company will owe 20-30 million in aid repayments.

 Of course, both of these cases will be appealed to the European court system, all the way to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the highest court in the EU. Tax haven shenanigans are built into the economic structure of both Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and the two countries will do everything they can to maintain the status quo. The Apple case is much bigger, because it goes back all the way to 1991, and some estimates have put its tax savings at billions per year. If Apple loses, and I think it will, we can again be assured that the case will be appealed to the CJEU.

If the Commission makes these decisions stand up on appeal, it will dramatically change the shape of tax havens in Europe (including Switzerland, which the EU holds as being subject to the state aid rules through its free trade agreement). It won't put them out of business, because the decisions pertain to corporate income tax rather than personal income tax, but the amount of revenue lost on the corporate tax alone is a very big deal.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Friday, October 2, 2015

Time for a new incentives estimate!

It's been over four years since I last published an estimate of U.S. state and local government subsidies in Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital, and the data there represented the situation circa 2005. So I think it's time to begin a new estimate, don't you?

We have a great place to begin. As you may recall, in December 2012 Louise Story of the New York Times published a series of articles, "The United States of Subsidies," which was accompanied by two searchable databases, one of individual deals and one on subsidy programs. The latter was far more comprehensive than anything previously published.

Unfortunately, the program database was flawed because $52 billion of the reported $80 billion in annual subsidies were for sales tax breaks that were for the most part not subsidies at all, but ways to prevent sales tax from being charged for inputs into goods that would pay full sales tax on their final sale. Upjohn Institute economist Timothy Bartik documented that $4.80 billion of the $4.83 billion in sales tax "subsidies" in Michigan fell into this category. There were smaller errors in the program database as well, such as wrongly including net operating loss provisions and omitting the cost of single sales factor apportionment (h/t Timothy Bartik).

Now, dear reader, I'd like to solicit your help. The first step is to review the sales tax breaks in the database, so as to include those relatively few that are genuinely subsidies, such as exemptions for capital goods, which by nature are targeted at investment. If you have insights on this for any of the sales tax programs, I would be extremely grateful if you would share them with me. I would also appreciate any assistance on step 2, which is updating from the 2011 data Story used. If you have the numbers or know the sources, please send them to me. Finally, the same is true for step 3, gathering information on local subsidies, which is much sparser than state-level program data. I will, of course, acknowledge your help in any publications based on this work.

For this project, you can email me at kpthomas@umsl.edu

Thanks in advance!

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Obamacare hasn't killed full-time jobs, either

When we last looked at Obamacare as an alleged "job-killer," Matt Yglesias had just pointed out that 2014, the first full year of insurance on the exchanges, was also the best year for job creation since 1999. But recently a non-blogging friend reminded me of a related anti-Obamacare meme, the idea that employers have been cutting their workers below 32 hours per week so they would not have to provide them with health insurance. His argument was, logically enough, that this would mean a loss of full-time jobs.

As with so many other anecdotal Obamacare horror stories, this one does not stand up to even simple inspection. Just like total job creation, it turns out that full-time (BLS uses 35 hours/week, not 32, by the way) job creation has quickly increased since December 2013, just before exchange insurance went into effect. Not only that, part-time employment has fallen slightly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly "Employment Situation" (Table A-9 in both cases) tells the tale.

Date            Full or Part Time     Not Seasonally Adjusted Jobs          Seasonally Adjusted Jobs

December 2013   Full-time          116,661,000                                      117,278,000
July 2015             Full-time         123,142,000                                     121,589,000
Change                                      + 6,481,000                                      + 4,311,000

December 2013   Part-time           27,762,000                                        27,372,000
July 2015             Part-time          26,850,000                                        27,265,000
Change                                          - 912,000                                          - 107,000

I included both seasonally adjusted and not seasonally adjusted data for completeness sake, but when we are comparing a summer month to a winter month, surely the seasonally adjusted figures are the correct ones to use. For those of you keeping score at home, then, full-time jobs have increased by 4.3 million since Obamacare exchange insurance went into effect, whereas part-time jobs have fallen by 107,000. Neither of these fits the anecdotes of workers being shunted from full-time to part-time work to avoid providing insurance. This increase in full-time work has been accomplished in the span of just 19 months, or an average of over 226,000 new full-time jobs per month.

Of course, it's theoretically possible that using sophisticated statistical controls might uncover a hidden negative relationship; that we'd have even more full-time jobs than we do if the exchanges hadn't gone into effect. Even if that were true, it's obvious that everything else going on in the Obama economy is having a much bigger effect on full-time employment, so there's no justification for using the epithet "job-killing" on the off chance that it's true.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Wednesday, August 19, 2015

Basics: Tax Increment Financing Subsidies

Last week I made a presentation to the Colorado Assessors Association on tax increment financing (TIF) subsidies. With the organization's permission, I am sharing the PowerPoint presentation for my talk, as well as adding this introduction.

The talk begins by putting TIF in the context of subsidies generally. As a subsidy, TIF is subject to the three main potential drawbacks of their use: Inefficiency, inequality, and environmental harm. These differing harms often call forth coalitions that prove the adage that "Politics makes strange bedfellows." One example was a joint appearance by Ralph Nader, Rep. John Kasich, and Grover Norquist in 1997. I was in a similar coalition in 2003 fighting a TIF that would have leveled downtown O'Fallon, Missouri, then the fastest-growing city in the state. Our leadership included people from liberal Democrats to future Tea Party members. Similarly, the mayor and TIF-supporting council members were bipartisan. It's easy to find single-party governments that abuse subsidies, too, whether it's now-Governor Kasich offering $400 million to move Sears from Illinois, or Democratic stronghold Kansas City, MO, offering multiple multi-hundred million dollar TIFs.

I then go on to discuss the legal particularities of TIF, which gives it another level of controversy. Tax increment financing typically allows governments to capture the property tax revenue of other districts (something especially hard on school districts), and these revenue fights are matched by the intense hatred the use of eminent domain usually brings forth.

The very first state to adopt TIF (in 1952), California axed TIF in 2011 due to its budget crisis, caused in part because the state reimbursed property tax revenue that school districts lost to TIF. Last year, a new version of TIF was passed, but it completely removes the option to take money from school districts, and lets other taxing jurisdictions opt out as well (see below).

Also of note in TIF history is the constant pressure to expand the locations able to use it (i.e., progressively less economically deprived areas want it in their subsidy arsenal) and the gross overuse of TIF for retail projects. As I mention in the link, St. Louis-area municipalities gave $2 billion in retail TIF from 1990 to 2007, creating all of 5400 jobs, no more than we'd expect on the basis of the area's income growth. That's why the relevant slide says $2 billion = 0 jobs.

Thanks to Karen Miller of the CAA for inviting me and agreeing to let me post the PowerPoint.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.



































Saturday, August 15, 2015

Final subsidy accounting rules published!

On Friday, the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) published the final version of its new rules requiring governments to make reporting on subsidies a standard part of their financial reports (known as Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports, or CAFRs). Since GASB determines the content of "Generally Accepted Accounting Principles," its new rules will have to be widely adopted.

Subsidy reformers such as Good Jobs First did not get everything they wanted in the new rules, but their publication represents a gigantic step forward in subsidy transparency. In particular, every government that gives tax-based subsidies will be required to report the amount they give each year. Moreover, every government that loses revenue to subsidies given by another government must report the amount as well. Most commonly, this will be school districts and other political units that lose property tax revenue to tax increment financing (TIF) or property tax abatements.

GASB continued its incomprehensible use of the term "tax abatement" as its catchall for all tax-based subsidies. As I pointed out in my own GASB comments, the term properly only refers to property tax abatements, a smallish proportion of local subsidies used in fewer states than TIF (see Greenbaum and Landers, "The TIFF over TIF," 2014, no ungated version available). On the plus side, as Good Jobs First points out, the final rules make clear that subsidies such as tax increment financing are included in their definition of "tax abatement," although a strict reading of the draft definition might well have excluded it and other subsidies. I considered this a worry in my GASB comments, because too much focus on legal fictions (TIF recipients are legally deemed to have paid their taxes, for instance) would obscure the fact that a subsidy exists. Happily, GASB opted to be inclusive in the definition, which will make it more difficult for governments to evade the new rules.

The real drawbacks of the new rules are that they don't require that the recipients, even the largest ones, be identified (this is optional); they don't require governments to say how many subsidies are in place (just the total cost of subsidies for that year); and they don't require a listing of future subsidies already committed. In addition, as I pointed out in my comments, they do not require a cross-listing of non-tax subsidies such as grants and loans so that people reading a CAFR can determine how much a government is spending and committed to spend on total subsidies.

Still, the new rules represent a tremendous advance over the status quo. Every state and local government will now have to report the value of the subsidies it gives every year. CAFRs are audited reports, meaning that multiple sets of eyes will look at the documents even before the public sees the reports and can cross-reference them with everything else known about a government's subsidies. Good Jobs First will be expanding its Subsidy Tracker database to include the new data in governments' annual reports. I'm looking forward to all these developments, and you should be, too.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Basics: Is trade zero-sum between workers in different countries?

Vox.com had a long, interesting interview with Senator Bernie Sanders covering a large number of political and economic issues. In this post, I want to focus on just one issue he raised: Whether rising incomes for Chinese workers have to come at the expense of U.S. workers. Here is what Sanders told Vox's Ezra Klein:
I want to see the people in China live in a democratic society with a higher standard of living. I want to see that, but I don't think that has to take place at the expense of the American worker. I don't think decent-paying jobs in this country have got to be lost as companies shut down here and move to China.
What Sanders doesn't mention is that the market, left to itself, will indeed force a tradeoff between U.S. and Chinese workers. We can see this via the Stolper-Samuelson Theorem, which says that increasing trade will raise the real incomes of a country's abundant factors of production and reduce the real incomes of the scarce factors of production. The reason is that abundant factors of production (relative to the rest of the world, of course) will find new markets abroad as trade increases, while scarce factors of production will face increased import competition. Since China is a labor-abundant country and the United States a labor-scarce one, the theorem implies that real wages will rise in China and fall in the United States as they increase trade (all trade, not just with each other). And this effect can be sped up if U.S. companies close factories in the United States and open them in China, just as we have seen happen.

To disable the tradeoff requires political intervention in the market. If you want to preserve gains from trade that are predicted by the theory of comparative advantage, and you want to not worsen income inequality in the United States, you need to find a way, as Ronald Rogowski pointed out, for  the winners to compensate the losers from trade. This isn't easy: As Rogowski also noted, the winners increase their clout in the political system while the losers see their influence decrease (look at the long-declining influence of unions here). As I've discussed before, the increased mobility of capital exacerbates this problem in the U.S., since capital is much more mobile than workers. And so we have seen a steady decrease in the tax burden paid by corporations and the rich, more trade agreements signed, and a constant drumbeat to cut Social Security (despite the coming retirement crisis) and "phase out" Medicare.

What would compensating the losers from trade look like? Most obviously, and most focused, is trade adjustment assistance, which is often criticized as inadequate. Yet it does not really make sense to compensate only those who lose their jobs directly to foreign competition, because those workers then spill into other sectors of the economy, driving down wages as they go. Thus, we need to go beyond trade adjustment assistance.

To raise wages in the economy more generally, we need broader measures. One would be to raise the minimum wage: It pushes up workers' pay, but it also reduces turnover and training costs for employers, and puts money into the hands of people with a high propensity to consume, creating multiple channels to counteract the seemingly self-evident fact that raising something's price means people will buy less of it.

Another broad-spectrum approach to raising wages is to restore the power of unions. As I have pointed out before, the United States has the fifth-lowest union density in the 34-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Senator Sanders, in the interview linked above, notes that the increased power of unions in Nevada's gambling industry has enabled house-cleaning staff in the state's casinos to earn "$35,000 or $40,000 a year and have good health-care benefits." Having a National Labor Relations Board that is not in the pocket of industry is critical for us to see this take place.

Third, less targeted still but having the political benefit of universal coverage, an expansion of the social safety net would make it possible for people to simply refuse to take crappy jobs. Yes, this is about bargaining power! It would also encourage entrepreneurship because failure would not mean the loss of one's health insurance, for example. Medicare for all has long been one of Senator Sanders' standard prescriptions, a program that benefits from having far lower overhead costs (it avoids outrageous executive salaries, the need for profit, and does not have to advertise much) than private insurance. We could do a lot worse than considering it -- and we have.

Finally, to pay for these programs, it's necessary to raise taxes on corporations and rich individuals. Thomas Piketty, in his monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century, suggests that the top marginal income tax rate should be 82% for individuals in the top 1/2% or top 1% of income. He notes that this will not raise much money, in part because it will reduce various lucrative but economically unproductive financial shenanigans. Instead, he thinks a tax of 50-60% on the top 5% of incomes would produce substantial revenue to create what he calls a "social state" for the 21st century. One could go further, of course, by adding a financial transactions tax (I hope to write about this soon) and shutting down tax havens.

To return to our original question, there is no reason that Chinese workers and U.S. workers can't both prosper from trade. But to make it possible in the United States requires a great deal of rule rewriting that will not be achieved overnight.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

Like us on Facebook and Twitter!

Facebook and Twitter followers get more than just immediate notification of new posts. I also promote selected articles from around the Web that are related to middle class issues. If you would find that of interest, I hope you'll support me there.

Thanks in advance!

Monday, July 13, 2015

Impending disaster in Greece

Paul Krugman analyzes the debacle in Greece. Although Greeks voted barely a week ago to reject the bailout terms offered by the EU, which called for uninterrupted austerity, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras proposed to the EU to accept almost all of the terms if there was some true financial relief. Instead, what the European Union, spurred by Germany, proposed today demanded all of the pain, and none of the gain that Tsipras sought. Indeed, Germany has essentially demanded regime change in Greece, even though Tsipras only came to office in January. As Krugman says, "It is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept."

The Germans, it would appear, have decided to push Greece from the eurozone. But demanding an end to Greek sovereignty and austerity as far as the eye can see is simply evil. Moreover, it negates the long-successful stand of European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi that the ECB would do "whatever it takes" to keep the eurozone intact. The ECB's reputation would be damaged greatly should crisis recur in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, etc., now that the world knows the ECB will not do "whatever it takes." This is a recipe for a new recession in Europe spreading from the EU periphery. The German demands are particularly "grotesque," as Krugman says, when you consider that Greece has already endured 25+% unemployment for three years (see chart). This is an unemployment rate that the United States never saw even at the height of the Great Depression in 1933, when it peaked at 24.9%.
source: tradingeconomics.com

However, I believe Krugman's argument actually overlooks an important point. He writes:
But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line.
His point is that eurozone membership has removed Greece's ability to exercise monetary policy autonomy and respond to its specific conditions, including via currency devaluation. Indeed, there can be no doubt that monetary union was flawed from the start. But Krugman overestimates the ability of devaluation to fix an economic crisis. At the same time, he underestimates the ability of creditors to destroy a government whose economic policies they disapprove of.

 The mega-example of this, of course, is the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s. Mexico, Brazil, and all the other victims of this crisis (caused primarily by the U.S. Federal Reserve cranking up interest rates to astronomical levels in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which in turn caused an unprecedented rise in the value of the U.S. dollar and a global recession) were "bailed out" by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to prevent the collapse of creditor banks in the United States, but were subject to strict austerity, with the same results we've seen in the EU. Indeed, in virtually every Latin American country income per capita was lower in 1990 than at the start of the crisis in 1982, giving rise to the term "lost decade of development" to describe these events. Supposedly, the IMF learned its lesson after the Asian financial crisis that austerity packages didn't work. Krugman has argued this many times (one example here). Indeed, the IMF has seemed to be more of a voice of sanity in the current crisis than in either the Latin American or Asian crises. Yet, in the endgame of the Greek crisis, this seems to have fallen away, with the IMF going along with the EU on Greek austerity. Something is seriously wrong here.

But there is another important example to mention, where the IMF was not involved. This, too, was a result of the Fed-caused global recession, this time in France. After Francois Mitterrand and the Socialist Party swept to power in 1981, among the government's many policy changes was an attempt at Keynesian stimulus. However, this was met by massive capital flight. The problem was that the French franc was losing so much value that the government had to reverse its policies. For example, the franc was 4.6453 to the dollar in January 1981, but fell to 8.0442 by August 1983, 9.3041 by September 1984, and 10.0933 in February 1985. The takeaway is that even having floating exchange rates does not guarantee that you can maintain your policy independence.

Events are moving very rapidly; perhaps the EU will find a way to prevent this disaster. But at the moment, things look very grim.

Monday, June 29, 2015

Will the U.S. keep winning indefinitely? ISDS, that is

Now that Congress has given the President fast-track Trade Promotion Authority, the first agreement to be considered under these rules (no amendments allowed, up or down vote in 90 days) will be the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). As you know from previous columns, one of the most worrying aspects of the TPP is its expansion of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), wherein private firms can bring their disputes with governments not to courts, but to international arbitration (usually through units of the World Bank or the United Nations), where legal precedent doesn't matter and appeal is all but non-existent. Moreover, as the Consumers Union has long argued (recent example here), arbitration has a well-known pro-business bias. That's why so many of your agreements with cable TV providers, financial services companies, and many more have fine print requiring mandatory arbitration, keeping you from getting your day in court if something goes wrong.

The response from the U.S. Trade Representative's (USTR) office has been, "Not to worry! The United States has never lost an ISDS case." The linked document goes on to claim that worldwide, only 1/4 of corporate plaintiffs have won cases against governments. But a new analysis by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD),* using the same data source the USTR cites, comes to a very different conclusion based on its most recent update, the 2015 World Investment Report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Moreover, we can see that countries with even more trustworthy court systems than that in the U.S. have lost ISDS cases. The Rule of Law Project, an initiative of the American Bar Association, has ranked 102 countries on the administration of justice and freedom from corruption, and puts the United States at #19 with a score of 0.73. Yet #14 Canada (0.78) has already lost ISDS cases, and both Canada and #10 Australia (0.80) are currently on the hook for major new cases (Eli Lilly and Philip Morris, respectively), that would overrule decisions by the countries' respective Supreme Courts. So, even if governments have only lost 25% of ISDS cases, it's unlikely U.S. luck will hold out indefinitely, if countries with better court systems are losing.

But it's worse than that. UNCTAD's database of known ISDS cases and their outcomes shows that in all cases decided through the end of 2014, the investor won 27% of the cases compared to 36% won by the state (see Figure III.10, p. 116). But another 26% of the cases are listed as "settled," which often (but not always) means the respondent agrees to make some payment to the plaintiff to keep the case from going to arbitration. Public Citizen has a list of ISDS cases under prior U.S. trade agreements with examples of settlements that do and do not contain payments (see, for instance, NAFTA cases against Canada).

Moreover, as IISD attorney Howard Mann argues, if we separate out cases between jurisdictional determinations and determinations on the merits of the case, things look even worse for states. While only 71 of 255 cases (this excludes the "settled" cases) were concluded by a decision of the tribunal having no jurisdiction, Mann points out that all 255 cases effectively had decisions on jurisdiction, i.e., cases with final decisions had to have rulings that the arbitrators had jurisdiction. In that case, Mann says, "Investors, therefore, have won 72 per cent [184/255] of jurisdictional determinations." And of the decisions on the merits of the cases, investors won 111, or 60%, of the remaining 184 cases. This calculation suggests that states are losing ISDS disputes at a much higher rate than normally portrayed. As if that's not bad enough, the new World Investment Report finds that in 2014, of the 15 ISDS cases decided on their merits, states lost 10 (2/3) of them. In 2013, it was even worse for states, with investors winning 7 of the 8 cases decided that year (p. 126). If these higher proportions continue, obviously the proportion of investor victories will increase beyond the current 60% total.

Bottom line: The threat to regulation, democracy, and the rule of law posed by investor-state dispute settlement is very real. The U.S. Trade Rep's  reassurances that the U.S. has never lost in ISDS don't even make it likely that will continue into the future. We need to pressure Congress to vote down the TPP when negotiations conclude.


* Important disclosure: I have consulted for IISD several times since 2007 on investment incentive issues.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Saturday, June 13, 2015

Elon Musk has received billions in subsidies

While receiving subsidies is nothing new for the Forbes 400 or even multi-hundred millionaire pikers like Mitt Romney, a recent story in the Los Angeles Times (via Good Jobs First) shows that Elon Musk (#34 in the Forbes 400) is a champion at getting subsidies for his companies. According to the Times article, Musk's three companies, Tesla, Solar City, and SpaceX, have received a total of $4.9 billion (nominal value) in subsidies over the years. The article says that Tesla and Solar City stand out in the importance of the subsidies relative to the size of the company.

While SpaceX has received only $20 million, both Tesla and Solar City have received over $2 billion each, if you count the value of the subsidies their customers have received for buying Tesla vehicles and Solar City installations. This is more significant in the case of Solar City (about $1 billion) than for Tesla (about $321 million). Even without these sums, the companies have directly received about $3.5 billion, most notably for the new Gigafactory in Nevada and for a solar panel facility in Buffalo, New York.

Regular readers will remember that I have long argued in my books and elsewhere that these subsidies represent a transfer from average taxpayers to the much wealthier owners of the companies involved, worsening the already substantial inequality in the United States. These investment incentives have to be offset by higher taxes on others, reduced government services, or higher levels of government debt. While they are not the biggest driver of inequality, they do their part. Moreover, location subsidies reduce the country's economic efficiency: It may well have made more economic sense to locate the battery Gigafactory as close as possible to Tesla's assembly plant in Fremont, California.

While Musk refused to be interviewed for the Times story, he responded the next day on CNBC. Among other things, he argued that it was wrong to report a single figure for subsidies, which makes it seem like he received one big check. This is right as far as it goes. However, I think it would make more sense to give a single present value for the subsidies rather than the nominal value, which overstates the value of multi-year subsidies such as those for Tesla. Moreover, as Good Jobs First points out, it is perfectly necessary for taxpayers to know what their long-term liabilities are for multi-year subsidies in order to properly assess the impact on government finances.

Musk also defended the Tesla subsidies as merely necessary to make the project happen faster, rather than necessary to happen at all. Yet it conducted a multi-state auction in an all-too-common use of its location decision for rent-seeking. As I analyzed at the time, the deal was below average in terms of cost per job and aid intensity compared to other automobile facilities, and it is 13 times larger than Nevada's previously largest incentive package.

Ultimately, the Musk story is far too familiar on a number of dimensions. Most importantly, it is a tale of rent-seeking and the policy/political drivers of inequality.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Friday, June 5, 2015

GE threatens to leave Connecticut UPDATED

A non-blogging friend has brought to my attention the fact that General Electric is threatening to move its corporate headquarters out of Connecticut in response to proposed tax increases in the state budget. The company, based in Fairfield, objects to increases in the taxes for data processing and corporate headquarters. Insurance companies Aetna and Travelers have also issued similar threats.

In GE's case in particular, this is pretty rich. The New York Times reports that GE made $14.2 billion in 2010 and received a federal tax refund of $3 billion. It is a company that touts bringing manufacturing jobs back from China but conveniently omits mentioning that the new jobs, in Louisville, pay $13/hour rather than the $22/hour they paid before they left for China. A model of corporate virtue it ain't, yet President Obama sees fit to lean on chief executive officer Jeffrey Immelt as one of his top business advisers.

Regular readers no doubt recall that every time a threat like this is made, vultures start to swoop in to attract the potential relocator to their state with a long list of goodies. So it should come as no surprise that a mere three days after GE first floated this idea, Tampa, Florida, has put GE in in its sights. We've seen this story many times before: Boeing and Sears immediately spring to mind. As always, the possibility of receiving relocation subsidies makes relocation less expensive and makes it more likely that a company's current home will have to give concessions to make it stay. Job piracy and job blackmail are intimately related.

As my friend points out, it's not surprising that Connecticut is running a big budget deficit. In just the past few years, according to the Good Jobs First Megadeals database (March 2015 spreadsheet update), the state gave $313.75 million to Schupp & Grochmal (2007), $89.5 million to Starwood Hotels (2009), $291 million to Jackson Laboratory (2011), $115 million to Bridgewater Associates (2012), and a whopping $400 million to United Technologies (2014). This last deal is fully 20% of the entire 2-year budget deficit facing the state, $2 billion.

A showdown is looming in this newest case of raw corporate power. Yesterday, the Connecticut legislature passed the budget, though leaders signaled a willingness to consider small changes when it comes back for a special session. The same day, however, Immelt emailed employees to let them know a task force had been set up to look into relocation.

Stay tuned!

Update: More evidence that GE is a whiny, hyper-aggressive tax avoider:  http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-cibes-ct-business-taxes-not-high-0609-20150608-story.html

Friday, May 22, 2015

May Tax-Cast is Out!

The May Tax-Cast from the Tax Justice Network is just out. Highlights include tax transparency from politicians in Pakistan and around the world, as well as an analysis of the recent UK general election.

Tuesday, May 12, 2015

TPP blocked, at least for now

Breaking news: The United States Senate failed to end a filibuster on giving the President fast-track negotiating authority for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), and any future deals for a six-year period.

According to The New York Times, the bill failed with only a 52-45 majority for it, when 60 votes were needed to end the filibuster. The biggest complaint among swing Democrats was that the TPP does not have enforceable provisions against currency manipulation -- such as practiced by China which, though not currently involved in the negotiations, would seem like a logical future party to the agreement. The Times reported that Japan and Malaysia are both opposed to this provision.

For the time being, then, we are spared an expansion of investor-state dispute settlement and further unnecessarily strong protections for intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyright, etc.). Unfortunately, if the proponents of the measure can reach a compromise with a group of eight Democrats (including Ron Wyden of Oregon) on enforcement measures, then they would have the 60 votes they need.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Why subsidize data centers?

A number of authors (Good Jobs First, David Cay Johnston, me, and me, among others) have pointed out that data centers (aka server farms) in the United States create very few jobs, yet receive state and local government subsidies that routinely exceed $1 million per job. I'm sure you already know that numbers like those make me ill: the typical automobile assembly plant will receive $150,000 or so per job, and require all sorts of component facilities to feed it -- though, sadly, economic development officials often given incentives to the supplier plants as well.

So why $1 million or more per job? Data centers pay reasonably well, and the biggest are connected to famous tech names like Apple, Google, and Facebook, but it seems to me that it's hard to get around the facts that there just aren't that many jobs, and they don't require an army of supplier facilities bringing indirect jobs.

But surely the competition for jobs is so steep that governments have no choice but to subsidize them? Actually, no. Aside from the fact that $1 million per job probably gives away more than the value of the investment to the government, my investigations have turned up multiple examples of companies building data centers without incentives.

One I've mentioned here before: American Express in 2010 built a $400 million data center in Greensboro, North Carolina, without any incentives at all. The leading explanation has been that Amex had already decided it was going to close a 1900-job call center in Greensboro (announced in 2011), a move it knew would trigger clawbacks of any incentives on the 50-150 job data center -- so it didn't bother seeking subsidies. Did I mention that North Carolina has cheap electricity?

More recently, I have found four Google data centers that opened or expanded without incentives in the last few years. New and expanded facilities in the Netherlands, Ireland, Finland, and Belgium all take advantage of cooler temperatures to reduce their electricity use. While Google did not respond to my email asking whether it received subsidies for those facilities, and IDA Ireland similarly was unresponsive, the Netherlands Foreign Investment Agency did respond with a confirmation that it had provided no "state aid" (EU-speak for subsidies) to the brand-new $773 million, 150-job data center opening in Groningen province in 2017. In addition, a search of the EU's Competition Directorate case database did not reveal any Google state aid cases for data centers. Thus, it appears that none of these cases received incentives.

So why did Google demand over $140 million (present value) in subsidies from North Carolina back in 2007? I think we're looking at the "usual suspect" once again, rent-seeking. Of course, North Carolina couldn't foresee the Amex no-incentive deal that didn't happen until 2010, but now that we can see how Google and American Express do business when they have to, it's time economic development officials around the country learned to "just say no" on data centers.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Moving the goal posts on ACA success UPDATED

Right. So the the same day that I posted about the substantial fall in the uninsured rate for adults that we have seen since Obamacare went into effect, a conservative writes at the Wall Street Journal making exactly the same arguments that Matt Yglesias had refuted. Cliff Asness writes in the WSJ:
That more people would be insured was never in dispute. If you mandate that people buy something, penalize them if they don’t and give it away to some, more people will end up with it. The proper response to this is: Duh.
So, as I said, Yglesias had already refuted this, giving a number of examples of conservatives who predicted there would be no reduction in the number of uninsured Americans. Today, Paul Krugman takes us to Jonathan Chait's response to Asness, where of course he piles on more examples of conservatives predicting a failure to improve the uninsured rate. Then he goes further. Asness wrote that a critical issue was "how many people covered by ObamaCare were previously uninsured." You can probably guess Chait's answer: "Well, that’s why you measure the net number of uninsured people, not just the gross expansion of coverage under Obamacare." Which leads us back to the chart showing the substantial fall in the uninsured rate that was in my last post (and Yglesias', Krugman's and no doubt many more besides).

The latest round is that yesterday Asness responded to Chait. Here is where the goal post move comes in:
In contrast the rise in coverage is heralded by a myriad of Obamacare supporters as one of two major pieces of proof the law is working. But, how can something we knew before the fact be proof of anything?
Did you catch that? If we predict that something good will happen as a result of a new law, and that good thing happens, it doesn't count as proof that the law was good. This is silly. We didn't actually know the insurance rate would fall, but we had economic models that told us it would. So not only is the fall evidence that the law is working, it's evidence that the models were right!

Somebody wake these people up.

UPDATE: @HaroldPollack points me to a new J.D. Power survey finding that people who signed up for insurance on the exchanges were more satisfied (696 out of 1000) than people with non-exchange plans, usually through employers (679 out of 1000). People re-enrolling on the exchanges scored even higher, with a score of 744 for people who re-enrolled on the Exchanges. Private plans offering multiple options were able to reach the 696 average for Exchange enrolees, which means that companies offering one insurance option had to be doing substantially worse than 679. Not surprisingly, new enrolees for 2015 were a large 55 points more satisfied than 2014 enrolees, who of course went through the disastrous rollout of healthcare.gov.  So people like their subsidies and they like their actual insurance policies, on average. Maybe that's why Republican Senators are getting antsy that there will be hell to pay if the Supreme Court rules for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Oh, look! The uninsured rate fell again!

As any conservative can tell you, Obamacare is a job-killing "train wreck." Not only is it a job killer, there is no way that it could possibly work. Except, of course, it does.

When I last visited this issue, the percentage of adults without health insurance had fallen from its peak of 18.0% in the third quarter of 2013 to 13.4% in the second quarter of 2014. Now, as Gallup (via Matt Yglesias) shows us, it continues to fall, dropping to 11.9% in the first quarter of 2015, based on over 43,000 interviews throughout the quarter. This is a drop of exactly one percentage point from the fourth quarter of 2014, or about 2.4 million adults.

The gains that we have seen now through two enrollment cycles (Q4 2013 through Q1 2015) affect every major demographic group, as the following table from Gallup shows.

Percentage of Uninsured Americans, by Subgroup

Especially notable are the gains for minorities (8.3 percentage points for Hispanics and 7.3 for African-Americans), those with income below $36,000 per year (8.7 points) and adults from 26-34 (7.4 points). But notice that even Americans making over $90,000 annually have seen their uninsured rate fall by 2.3 points, meaning that 40% of this group is no longer uninsured. This is actually the biggest percentage gain among any of the demographics Gallup surveyed.

As Gallup and Yglesias both point out, part of the reason for the improvement is the declining unemployment rate. But Yglesias is right on the money that this undermines the "job-killer" meme. In fact, as he shows, 2014 was "the best year of job creation since 1999."

This is one argument conservatives aren't going to win. In fact, it looks like they've already lost the vote of one Tea Partier who was able to retire early because of Obamacare.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Good Jobs First reveals top federal subsidy recipients: Subsidy Tracker 3.0

Slow to be getting to this, but I have to come back to such a major development. Good Jobs First, a national non-profit best known for its work on state and local subsidies to business, unveiled in March its Subsidy Tracker 3.0. This work differs from previous publications on federal subsidies by being project-based/firm-based, rather than program-based. This lets us know which companies have received the most federal subsidies over the years.

"Uncle Sam's Favorite Corporations" finds that the federal government has awarded $68 billion in "grants and special tax credits" in the last 15 years. 2/3 of this has gone to large corporations. This is on top of hundreds of billions of dollars given to the banking sector during the financial crisis. One advantage of using Subsidy Tracker 3.0 is that it incorporates previous work by Good Jobs First tracking parent/subsidiary relationships.

One substantial finding is that:
Six parent companies have received more than $1 billion in grants and allocated tax credits (those awarded to specific companies), 21 have received $500 million or more, and 98 have received $100 million or more. Just 582 large companies account for 67% of the $68 billion total.
All six of the billion-recipients are in the energy sector: Spanish company Iberdrola tops the list with $2.2 billion, followed by NextEra Energy, NRG Energy, Southern Company, Summit Power, and SCS Energy. And five companies were on all three of the top 50 federal subsidy recipients list, the top 50 bailout list, and the top 50 state & local subsidy list: Boeing, Ford, General Electric, General Motors, and JPMorgan Chase.

It's important to recognize that project-based and program-based subsidy databases serve two functions that that do not reduce to each other. If you want to know the total amount of money governments give in incentives, you need program-based reporting. This is because many subsidy programs provide benefits automatically to all investors meeting certain criteria and they rarely list all the automatic recipients. In that case, you need to know what the program as a whole is spending. This is the approach I have taken in my subsidy estimates in Competing for Capital and Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital, and Louise Story took in the New York Times program database ("State Money Flow") in its December 2012 series "The United States of Subsidies." To understand the overall scope of the problem, you need program-based reporting.

Of course, program-based reporting can have its flaws. A number of think-tanks with widely varying ideologies have produced these reports over the years, and they appear to give dramatically different answers. In fact, as I showed in Competing for Capital (pp. 152-158), the answers are all highly consistent, as they are based on a handful of federal studies (the Joint Committee on Taxation's Tax Expenditures reports, the Congressional Budget Office's Reducing the Deficit: Spending and Revenue Options, and the CBO's occasional publication, Federal Financial Support of Business). The differences, even when they are seemingly vast, stem from clear ideological choices by think-tank researchers.

To take the most obvious example, when the Cato Institute estimates "corporate welfare," it does not include the value of subsidies which take the form of tax expenditures. This give a much smaller number than estimates that follow the JCT/CBO methodologies closely, since tax expenditures easily total 2/3 of federal subsidies (and often 90% of state and local subsidies). In Cato's 2012 estimate of federal corporate welfare, author Tad DeHaven admits (p. 12) that tax expenditure are a "form" of corporate welfare, but he does not include them in his claimed total of $98 billion in federal "corporate welfare" annually. On the flip side, for any federal agency Cato wants to see privatized, it counts the entire budget as "corporate welfare." This inflates the Cato estimates relative to those which stick closer to the JCT/CBO methodologies, such as Citizens for Tax Justice.
,
Project-based reporting, like Good Jobs First does with Subsidy Tracker and Megadeals, can find large individual recipients and projects, but it does not get you anywhere near the total amount of subsidies given by an individual government. As mentioned above, many programs with automatic tax breaks for investors do not give individualized listings of their recipients. (Hopefully this will change when the Government Accounting Standards Board releases its final tax incentive rules.) But because you can document every single individual award, you can derive an absolute baseline which is irrefutable.

The inauguration of Subsidy Tracker 3.0 is a great addition to the transparency tools brought to us by Good Jobs First.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Wikileaks Releases Trans-Pacific Partnership Investment Chapter

Via Daily Kos, we learn that Wikileaks has released the investment chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This is a critical chapter, as it was in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), because it establishes investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanisms.

Despite its neutral-sounding name, ISDS is actually a radical concept. Instead of using the courts to settle disputes, which have appeals procedures and build up case law via precedent, ISDS allows companies to take governments to arbitration, where neither precedent nor appeals exist.

Susan Sell gave several examples of ISDS in her guest post in February, which illustrate the dangers well. Eli Lilly had two of its pharmaceutical patents invalidated in Canada; the company appealed both of these decisions to the Canadian Supreme Court, and lost both times. Then the company turned to investor-state dispute settlement under NAFTA to receive $500 million in compensation for the Supreme Court decisions. That case is still ongoing.

In an example also noted by Wikileaks, Sell points out that U.S. tobacco maker is using ISDS against Australia because the country mandated plain packaging on cigarettes to make them look less attractive. This should not be possible, because the U.S.-Australia Free Trade Agreement does not include investor-state dispute settlement provisions. Instead, the company is using a subsidiary in Hong Kong, which has a free trade agreement with Australia that does include ISDS, to bring the complaint. Indeed, the government alleges that Philip Morris Asia bought the Australian subsidiary, already owned by the parent company, so that it could bring this complaint.

Unsurprisingly, Australia is opposed to including ISDS in the TPP agreement, and in the current draft has excluded itself completely from ISDS. However, the draft also shows that Australia might end its objection "subject to certain conditions." Since the negotiation is being conducted in strict secrecy, there is no way to find out what those conditions might be, unless someone leaks them to the press.

The Obama administration continues to seek "fast track" negotiating authority from Congress for the TPP. This would allow the agreement to be voted on only as negotiated, with no amendments allowed. Note that this also means that the TPP would be incorporated as a U.S. law rather than as a treaty. As a law, it only needs a majority in both Houses of Congress. If it were to be offered for approval as a treaty, it would need a 2/3 majority in the Senate, with no House vote. Both NAFTA and the World Trade Organization agreements were passed as laws rather than treaties.

Don't forget that ISDS is also on the negotiating table in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with the European Union. ISDS is also under fire in the European Union. In an ironic twist of events, the European Commission, a supporter of ISDS (h/t Washington Post) so far in the negotiations, has ruled in a state aid case involving Romania that paying an ISDS award (Micula v. Romania) to a company whose subsidies were terminated due to EU law, would itself be an illegal state aid! The Commission's effort to effectively nullify the decision (further irony: brought under the Sweden-Romania bilateral investment treaty, so both EU members) is not sitting well with proponents of ISDS. Too bad!

If we're lucky, the combined opposition of Germany, a large part of the EU public, some parts of the European Commission, and a growing portion of the U.S. public will kill off ISDS in the TTIP. We need to make sure it disappears from the TPP as well, even if that means rejecting the TPP. And we may well want to reject the TPP anyway over its provisions on medicines and other intellectual property issues.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.