Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Large companies grab most incentives aimed at small businesses.


It shouldn't come as a surprise.

How Economic Development Incentives Hurt Small Businesses: States say they want to help independent businesses, but large companies take the majority of the dollars, by Richard Florida (City Lab)

 ... Billions of state and local economic incentive dollars seemingly aimed at small businesses flow instead to a few large, well-established, and well-connected businesses. This is yet another example of how the rapidly growing economic-development incentive game remains a perverse and useless waste of taxpayer money ...

... ultimately, the study found that large companies captured between 80 and 96 percent of these small-business incentives, depending on the state in question.

In simple terms, these large companies have become sophisticated at gaming incentive dollars—including those explicitly aimed elsewhere ...

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