If you’ve been following my posts over the last few years, you know that Iceland took the dramatic step of prosecuting top officers at the country’s big 3 banks, all of which were allowed to go bankrupt in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. Unlike Ireland, it did not turn bank debt into government […]
Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA). Country-by-country reporting, the brainchild of noted tax reformer Richard Murphy,* is a principle that makes it possible to […]
On Wednesday, General Electric announced that it was going to relocate its headquarters from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Boston beginning in 2016. Even without the headline, you probably already guessed that the relocation was subsidized — in this case, by both the state of Massachusetts ($120 million) and the city of Boston ($25 million). 800 jobs […]
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, […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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: […]