NYT Series Illuminates -- And Confuses -- The State of the Subsidy Wars

Louise Story's series in the New York Times this week has created a substantial buzz about the issue of economic development subsidies.This is a welcome development, because it's an issue that doesn't get nearly enough attention in the highest profile media. Story has, in addition, appeared on shows such as MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and NPR's "Fresh Air," bringing subsidies to an even wider audience.



She crafted a number of stories that highlighted the big picture issues: imbalance in bargaining power between city governments and giant multinational corporations, the blatant conflicts of interest on display in Texas subsidy procurement, and a border war between Kansas and Missouri involving multimillion dollar incentives to move existing facilities across the state line, with no net benefit for the Kansas City metropolitan area, let alone for the U.S. as a whole.



The last few days have given me time to absorb the articles and the database Story created, as well as surveying the commentary on the web from well-known experts on subsidies. Several tentative conclusions seem in order.



First, as I pointed out in my last post, and backed up by Timothy Bartik's detailed analysis of Michigan, 5/8 of the national total is in the form of sales tax breaks, and probably the overwhelming majority of those sales tax reductions should not be considered subsidies. Here is what Bartik says about Michigan:

For example, in my own state of Michigan, the New York Times database
identifies $6.65 billion in annual state and local business incentives.
Of this total, $4.83 billion is in “sales tax refund, exemptions, or
other sales tax discounts”.  Of this $4.83 billion, almost all of these
refunds come from two provisions of Michigan tax law. First, Michigan
does not apply the sales tax to most services, including business
services, which saves businesses $3.88 billion annually. Second, for
manufacturing, Michigan does not apply the sales tax to goods used as
inputs to the manufacturing process, which saves manufacturers about
$0.92 billion in sales tax.

For those keeping score at home, that means that $4.80 billion of the $4.83 billion in sales tax breaks should not be considered subsidies, unless you consider manufacturing "specific" enough that this aid constitutes a subsidy, in which case only 80% of the sales tax breaks should be excluded from the subsidy tally.



Second, changes of this magnitude mean that the Times estimates are not sufficiently accurate to use in a statistical analysis, as Richard Florida attempts in The Atlantic Cities. Finding out if incentives affect outcomes like wages, employment, or poverty is precisely the type of analysis we would like to do, but the fragility of the data makes this premature. The good news is that since the data on these state programs are all in one place, it should be possible to get a better handle on state incentives by cutting out those programs which should not be considered subsidies. Different analysts will no doubt have different judgments about what should be counted as a subsidy, but since the database is so inclusive, it should be useful no matter what your definition of subsidy is.



Third, there are some smaller errors in the program database as well. The one I have identified so far is that it counts net operating loss (NOL) tax provisions as subsidies in Illinois and New Hampshire, but not in other states, even though all states with a corporate income tax will have an NOL provision. In any event, this should not be considered a subsidy at all, but a part of a state's basic macroeconomic framework. In addition, Timothy Bartik pointed out to me in correspondence that the program database does not include single sales factor apportionment (only counting what percentage of a multi-state firm's sales take place in a given state, rather than standard three-factor apportionment that uses percentages of payroll and property as well) as a subsidy, which it should.



Fourth, the program database does not distinguish between investment incentives (subsidies to affect the location of investment) and subsidies more generally, which may or may not require an investment to obtain them. This is an important distinction I have tried to make clear by providing separate estimates in Investment Incentives and the Global Competition for Capital: $46.8 billion in incentives, and $65 or $70 billion in subsidies, depending on whether or not you count non-specific accelerated depreciation as a subsidy.



Finally, as Phil Mattera at Good Jobs First points out, the deals database misses a number of large awards, leaving out Tennessee's $450 million (present value) subsidy to Volkswagen and an even bigger package for ThyssenKrupp in Alabama. It also underestimates other awards, including Apple in North Carolina and Boeing in South Carolina. I also found that it underestimated subsidies to Dell and Google in North Carolina by omitting the local subsidy portion of the awards, a problem Ms. Story is aware of, as I noted in my last post.



The Times series has been great for the spotlight it has put on state and local subsidies and the sometimes vulgar politics surrounding the process of awarding them, and for compiling a great database of programs all in one place. However, its interpretation of the sales tax breaks, which are 5/8 of the national total but largely not subsidies, confuses the issue of total impact on state and local budgets and makes statistical analysis premature. This will require some work to fix, but it appears like most of the raw material is there to do it.



Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

NYT: $80 Billion in State and Local Subsidies Annually (Updated)

In today's New York Times, Louise Story begins a series, "The United States of Subsidies," ten months in the making, with a story focusing on General Motors closures, the border war for investments between Kansas and Missouri in the Kansas City metropolitan area, and a new estimate of state and local incentives to business, $80 billion a year. Backing this up, and no doubt contributing to the long lead time, is a database of 150,000 state and local subsidy deals going back at least 20 years. Given its appearance in the country's newspaper of record, the series is sure to elevate the issue of state and local subsidies to a prominence it has never known before.



Since my 2011 estimate was $70 billion per year in total subsidies to business, and $46.8 billion in location incentives, the Times figure represents a substantial increase if accurate. Ever since David Cay Johnston reviewed my book when it first came out, he has argued that my $70 billion figure was probably an underestimate, and the new report would seem to back him up. Nevertheless, I will certainly be spending some time analyzing the database to see just what is in it. According to the story, $18 billion per year is accounted for by corporate income tax breaks, a whopping $52 billion by "sales tax relief," and the other $10 billion unspecified but most likely property tax breaks. I have some questions about these numbers, however.



First, it seems to me that property tax breaks likely exceed $10 billion a year. When California axed tax increment financing earlier this year, it was generating $8 billion in tax increment all by itself. Although California cities were by far the biggest user of TIF, municipalities in almost every other state still use it, as well as myriads of property tax abatements offered at the local level. Story is well aware of this. She writes:

The cost of the awards is certainly far higher. A full accounting, The
Times discovered, is not possible because the incentives are granted by
thousands of government agencies and officials, and many do not know the
value of all their awards.

Thousands of local governments give subsidies, and these are overwhelmingly related to property tax. In my most recent estimate, there were several states in Missouriwhich local subsidies exceeded state subsidies, including Missouri and Michigan, so my default  assumption was that they were equal if I did not have adequate information on local incentives, as is usually the case due to the huge number of governments involved.



On the other hand, there is some chance that the $52 billion in sales tax subsidies could be an overestimate; it all depends on what The Times includes in this category. My own thinking about sales tax has changed since I first created the subsidy estimates in my 2000 book, Competing for Capital. My estimate for Minnesota, for example, included many hundreds of millions per year in sales tax exemptions for business services. Now, I tend to think of these tax breaks as methods to avoid tax cascading (paying the sales tax on a good more than once, by taxing the full value of every intermediate good) and not a subsidy at all. They have been removed from my estimate of total subsidies in my more recent work, which did not prevent my estimate for 2005 (published in 2011) from being $20 billion higher than that for 1995 (published in 2000). I do still count some sales tax breaks as subsidies, particularly those on plant and equipment, which apply to the initial investment rather than ongoing operations.



While this may seem like a sterile academic argument, in fact it makes a big difference whether incentives are $50 billion a year or $80 billion a year, approximately 600,000 public sector jobs paying $50,000 annually. The larger the true figure, the more pressing is the case for subsidy reform. The inauguration of this new series of articles, plus the database, will help us put a better number on the value, a critical first step toward galvanizing public opinion to force politicians to rein in subsidies.



I will be commenting more on this series over the course of this week.



UPDATE: Text corrected to reflect that although I had specific data for local incentives in Michigan, the total of local incentives was somewhat lower than that of state incentives. In addition, it is clearly true that TIF in California exceeded state subsidies, so obviously so did the total of local subsidies. However, I did not know this at the time I made the estimate.



Cross-posted at Angry Bear.

The Folly of Subsidizing Retail

Next to giving subsidies for a company to relocate, or to prevent it from locating, the lease defensible common use of investment incentives is for retail. Why should this be? Let me count the ways.



Most importantly, retail is a derivative economic activity, as David Cay Johnston says. A location's population and income determine how much retail it can support. For this reason, the apparent job creation of retail subsidies is completely phantom, as sales and jobs are simply transferred from older stores to newer locations. The best proof of this is contained in a groundbreaking study by the East-West Gateway Council of Governments, the regional planning agency of the St. Louis metropolitan area.



East-West Gateway's study found that from 1990 to 2007 (i.e., before the financial crisis), the over 100 local governments of the St. Louis metro area had collectively provided over $2 billion in subsidies for malls and other retail facilities. Most of this was in the form of tax increment financing, a popular local subsidy tool in both Missouri (to the tune of $339 million annual average from 2004 to 2006; see p. 7 in the source) and Illinois. Yet, by the end of this 17 year period, there were only 5400 more retail jobs in the metro area than at the beginning. This would total $370,370 per job if the jobs were created by the subsidies; however, it is more likely that they are simply due to income growth in the region. (Note to reporters: This would be a great study to replicate in your area.)



Second, retail jobs are not all that good. Here is a custom graph from FRED showing the nominal wage trend for all production and non-supervisory workers (blue) and for production and nonsupervisory workers in retail (red). As you can see, the wage gap has been increasing for 40 years. As of September, the exact figures were $13.86/hr. for retail vs. $19.81/hr. for all private industries. Moreover, given that the overall total as shown in the graph actually represents a decline in real wages, the decline in retail is much more pronounced.

In addition to the low pay, retail workers rarely get benefits. According to a new report, only 29% of retail workers get health care benefits, even though half of retail employees have college degrees and 70% are over age 24.



Third, retail does not generate much secondary employment, the way manufacturing does. It does require warehouse jobs, but those generally get subsidized, too, as in the case of Wal-Mart.



The bottom line, then, is simple. Retail is a derivative economic activity that generates almost no new spinoff activity, and local governments (except perhaps in poor areas with food deserts) should not subsidize it. As we have seen in St. Louis, local governments have proven perfectly capable of wasting billions of dollars for temporary gains in sales tax revenues. It's time to stop the madness.