Billions for Job Piracy Despite State Budget Cuts

According to Center on Budget and Policy Priority data cited by Louise Story, in 2011 the states enacted $156 billion of austerity measures, between budget cuts and tax hikes. Despite their budgetary woes, however, this did not stop them from throwing billions of dollars a year into the worst kind of corporate subsidy, relocation incentives that move existing facilities from one state to another without creating any new jobs. A new report from Good Jobs First documents their widespread use, which is far more common than most people would imagine.



One great aspect of this report is that it goes beyond the two examples of interstate border wars we hear the most about, New York-New Jersey-Connecticut and Kansas-Missouri. We learn about Texas and Georgia vs. the world, North Carolina-South Carolina (especially in the Charlotte metro area), Tennessee-Mississippi (particularly with Memphis as target), and Rhode Island-Massachusetts. In addition, we learn more about the flip side of job piracy, retention subsidies, of which Sears' two in Illinois are the most egregious.



For example, Continental Tire moved its North American headquarters and 320 jobs from Charlotte to Lancaster County, South Carolina, in 2009. Georgia gave Ohio-based NCR Corp. (formerly National Cash Register) $109 million to relocate that same year. In 2010, Hamilton Beach received at least $2 million to move from Memphis to Olive Branch, Mississippi, while in 2009 McKesson received $4 million from Mississippi in addition to local incentives to move from Memphis to neighboring DeSoto County. Rhode Island, in a widely publicized move, gave Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling's video game company 38 Studios a $75 million loan to move from Massachusetts in 2009, only to see the  firm go bankrupt in 2012. There are many more examples in the report, but you get the idea.



The existence of relocation subsidies makes it possible for companies to demand incentives to stay in a particular state, i.e., retention subsidies. Two of the three largest ones went to Sears in Illinois, $168 million in 1989 and another $275 million in 2012 when the 1989 deal expired. The second largest was $250 million to Prudential Insurance from New Jersey in 2011. But many more states have had to shell out retention subsidies on a regular basis.



The report notes that at least 40 states know how to write no-raiding language into their subsidy programs, because they already have such language banning intra-state relocations from receiving subsidies under various programs. However, as far as I know, far fewer states prevent their cities from giving relocation subsidies to in-state firms, though the report shows that Maine's Employment Tax Increment Financing rules do provide that.



What is necessary, the report argues and I wholeheartedly agree, is that states need to tweak their program language to stop rewarding interstate job relocation as well. They need to stop efforts to directly poach existing firms, something Texas is heavily engaged in. The report says there is a "possible" federal role here, to withhold some Department of Commerce monies from states that engaged in job piracy. I, on the other hand, think that federal action is the only way it will happen. As I've written before, voluntary state efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to end job piracy have been utter failures, and the states clearly need an outside enforcement mechanism, which can only be provided by the federal government.



With such extensive documentation of how widespread relocation and retention subsidies are, hopefully more people can be mobilized to get the federal action we need.



Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

News of Note: Job Piracy, Tax Havens, Filibuster Reform

A lot has happened during my busy first week of classes, so I want to flag a couple of the most important pieces of news from the week.



1.  Good Jobs First has a blockbuster report on relocation subsidies. I will have a full post on this report as soon as I have time to digest it.



2. Tax Justice Network's January Taxcast is out, with reports on Dell in Spain, an EU threat to blacklist Switzerland, and a look at "Google Capitalism."



Hear it here.



3. Filibuster reform was less than hoped. Recall how overrepresented rural states are in the Senate in the first place. Here are Ezra Klein's pessimistic take and Chris Bower's somewhat more optimistic take on the changes.

Conservative ALEC Economic Policies Have No Benefit, Some Risks, for States

The economic policies proposed for states by the conservative American Legislative Council Exchange (ALEC) not only don't work, but carry risks for states' economies, according to new research by the Iowa Policy Project and Good Jobs First.



As we have seen most recently with Michigan's passage of anti-union so-called "right to work" legislation (which lets people free ride on union contracts and makes union organization and representation more difficult), the legislative agenda of ALEC proclaims that states should follow a low-tax, low-wage, non-union route to economic prosperity. Now, you or I might wonder how creating low-wage jobs is supposed to create prosperity, but luckily for us ALEC has ranked the states by how "competitive" their economic policies were beginning in 2007, giving us the chance to see how well their recommended policies have done.



ALEC's 15 recommended factors (p. 18) include taxes, debt service, public employees per 10,000 residents, "quality" of the legal system, "right to work," minimum wage, and workers' compensation costs. As pointed out by earlier commentaries, it says nothing about education or infrastructure, which have clear effects on a state's economy. The new report by economist Peter Fisher with Greg LeRoy and Phil Mattera undertakes a statistical analysis of these policies, using the ALEC ranking of all 50 states as of 2007 to see how well their economies have performed since then. Fisher et al. also highlight the shoddy statistical work by Arthur Laffer in creating the ALEC index and reporting results.



Whereas Laffer frequently makes his points simply by comparing the top vs. bottom 8-10 states, Fisher et al. start with a full comparison of all 50 states via a correlation analysis, then proceed to the necessary addition of holding other potential causes constant in what is know as multiple regression analysis. Beginning with the correlations, here is what the new report finds. Correlation runs from -1 (perfect negative relationship) to +1 (perfect positive relationship); the closer to +1 below, the better the ALEC competitiveness index predicted the following outcomes. All changes are from 2007 to 2011.



ALEC Competitiveness Index ranking correlated with--



State gross domestic product:  .02 (not statistically significant)

Percent change in nonfarm employment: -.09 (not statistically significant)

Percent change in per capita income: -.27 (statistically significant)

Percent change in state and local government revenue: -.16 (not statistically significant)

Percent change in median family income: -.30 (statistically significant)

Change in poverty rate: .21 ("statistically significant" at the .1 level*)



What this tells us is that the states which were following ALEC's preferred policies the most in 2007 saw worse performance in per capita income growth and median family income as well as a worse performance n poverty that we can almost be sure was not due to chance. The only thing ALEC's top states did see as predicted was an increase was in  population (Fisher et al. did not report the correlation coefficient, but their discussion makes it clear that it was statistically significant). However, population growth per se is not an economic outcome, as the report points out.



The concluding regression analysis weakens the case for negative consequences, but provides no support for positive effects of ALEC's state policies. Fisher et al. show that the most important determinants of 2007-11 GDP growth, employment growth, and per capita income growth are the components of a state's economy, with the strongest determinants being the presence of extractive industry (primarily due to the higher price of oil during this period) and a large health care industry. Once these are controlled for, none of the ALEC variables are statistically significant, though the closest is that the top personal income tax rate is associated with higher, not lower, per capita income growth.



If none of ALEC's policies work as advertised for job and income growth, what do they do? They are, in fact, a prescription for economic inequality. So-called "right to work" does not increase growth, but it reduces workers' bargaining power. Reducing taxes on the wealthy increases post-tax inequality. And so on, down the panoply of ALEC policies. Fisher et al. (p. 11) put it well:

The ALEC-Laffer strategies are exclusively those that would lower taxes on corporations and the wealthy, reduce public sector revenues (and hence public investments in education, health and infrastructure), and lower wages by eliminating minimum wages and weakening the bargaining power of workers. Yet the book claims that all of these measures would make states, and their populations, richer.

The report is Selling Snake Oil to the States, and that is precisely what ALEC's policies are.





* Technical note: I'm old school on when we should consider something probably not due to chance. For generations, the standard cutoff was that you have to be 95% certain a result was *not* due to chance to call it statistically significant. In economics, and now increasingly in political science, researchers have sometimes called a result statistically significant using a 90% cutoff instead. In my view, this shift has been due to what is called "publication bias": it is easier to get your study published in an academic journal if you have some statistically significant result. But this is a big problem in areas like minimum wage research, where not finding a statistically significant negative effect from increasing the minimum wage actually tells you a great deal. The key analysis of publication bias in minimum wage research can be found in David Card and Alan Krueger's book Myth and Measurement.



Cross-posted at Angry Bear.