Ireland still isn't back

Ireland remains, in some circles, a poster child for austerity's success: It paid off its bailout loan early! It regained its 2007 Gross Nation Income per capita in 2014! Unemployment is only 8.9%! Don't believe the hype.

Paul Krugman recently pointed out that Ireland's employment performance continues to be dismal, especially in comparison with currency-devaluing, banker-prosecuting Iceland. Iceland's employment now exceeds its pre-crisis peak by about 2.5% whereas Ireland is still, 8 years later, 8% below its peak. More specifically, Irish employment peaked in Q1 2008 at 2,160,681; in Q3 of 2015, the figure was still only 1,983,000.

Not only that, but in 2014-2015 (May-April), Ireland continued with net emigration, as 11,600 more people left than came to Ireland. This was a substantial improvement of 9800 over the April 2014 figure, but still the trend is that Ireland is exporting unemployment literally.

Things are obviously getting better in Ireland for those who remain behind. Jobs are being created, and the number of unemployed has fallen. The April 2016 immigration report (the data are only reported once a year) may finally see an end to net emigration. But Ireland is 80% of the way to a lost decade, and isn't out of the woods yet.

Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.