Report: Business tax incentives account for 21 cents of every $1 in La. budget

Every hour of every day in America, local governments give an average of $9.1 million in business incentives to companies large and small, which adds up to more than $80 billion every year. Those are just some of the eye-popping stats included in an extensive report by The New York Times dissecting the role business incentives play in budgets on the state and local level. “A portrait arises of mayors and governors who are desperate to create jobs, outmatched by multinational corporations and short on tools to fact-check what companies tell them,” reads the report, which the newspaper says was compiled after thousands of local incentive programs and more than 150,000 awards were analyzed. In Louisiana, a legislative panel is currently reviewing a total of $4.4 billion worth of tax exemptions, rebates and credits on the books, with an eye to determining whether Louisiana gets enough benefits from the giveaways to justify their cost. The New York Times report says $1.79 billion is spent on such incentive programs each year in Louisiana. That calculates to $394 per capita spent each year on incentives in the state, and accounts for 21 cents of every dollar in the state budget. Read the full story here for more details. You can also check out an interactive map the newspaper has created to detail incentive spending in each state here, and another interactive feature examining the incentives received by 48 of the nation’s largest corporations that have netted more than $100 million in state awards since 2007 here.