Tag: Good Jobs First

Guest Blog (Michael Lipsky): ALEC’s and Arthur Laffer’s worthless recommendations for prosperity in the states

Michael Lipsky is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Demos. This post originally appeared on the Policy Shop blog. For most of its history ALEC has operated in the background, but its influence recently drew the spotlight when its promotion of… Read more [More...]

Oklahoma ranked 6th in the nation for tax break safeguards, but serious gaps remain

States are spending billions of dollars per year on corporate tax credits, cash grants and other economic development subsidies that often require little if any job creation and lack wage and benefit standards covering workers at subsidized companies. These are… Read more [More...]

Tax Breaks: Setting out the case for and against

Note: The Task Force for the Study of State Tax Credits and Economic Incentives, created by HB 1285, is meeting over the interim to scrutinize tax credits. This blog post excerpts an OK Policy issue brief from last year titled… Read more [More...]

Show Us the Subsidies: New report sheds light on disclosure efforts

Oklahoma is doing a better job of providing public disclosure of economic development subsidies being paid out to companies but still has considerable room for improvement, according to a new report from Good Jobs First. The report, titled Show Us… Read more [More...]

Bridging the gap (1): Revisiting the vendor sales tax discount

With state revenue collections seeing their steepest plunge in a generation, Oklahoma is enduring a tough year of state budget cuts that are already having a harmful effect on families, communities and the economy. However, while the severity of this… Read more [More...]

Stimulus reporting–more dead trees don’t help you see the forest

There’s been a lot of news about stimulus reporting the last few weeks. A lot of it has focused on jobs created or saved; that’s understandable since that was a major point of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which… Read more [More...]

Sunk: Mercury Marine fiasco casts light on costs of state subsidy wars

Over the past several months, we have blogged several times on state tax incentives, in particular on the need to strengthen transparency and evaluation of tax credit programs (see our posts here,  here, here and here). The issue  seems to… Read more [More...]

Taking credit: Task Force explores use and misuse of transferable tax credits

Are tax breaks for businesses a legitimate tool of economic development, or a form of corporate welfare? The fact is they can be either. The challenge is telling the two apart and ensuring through clear legislative language and ongoing oversight… Read more [More...]

Is spending the easy part? Stimulus transparency is opaque

As the debate about the speed and impact of stimulus spending rages on, Good Jobs First is taking on the less glamorous but equally important task of assessing accountability in state spending of funds from the stimulus bill (more formally,… Read more [More...]

Keeping track

Spending from the $787 billion stimulus bill, formally known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, is underway. Since passage of the bill in February, payroll withholding for most employees has been decreased thanks to the Making Work… Read more [More...]