Some people call it corporate welfare, others say business incentives, or development subsidies.
By any name, state and local spending for economic development has boomed in the last 20 years. With that boom have come disputes about plant closings, dubious deals, and a civil war for jobs among the states. These problems have spawned a wide array of grassroots reforms, most of them spearheaded by NFG-member grantees who are forming new and unusual alliances to thrust historically arcane budget matters into the broader public debate. No one can assign a total dollar figure to subsidies such as property tax abatements, tax credits, training grants, or tax-exempt bonds, but we can track their proliferation. The decline of manufacturing during the 1980s made it easy for companies to pit states against each other.