Three Subsidy Stories You Might Have Missed This Week

1. Economists gave mixed reviews to Eric Adams’s tax break proposals, which include a weekly sales tax holiday, a commercial rent tax suspension, and more (Crain’s New York). The commercial rent tax suspension suggested by the NYC mayoral candidate and Brooklyn Borough President would apply to businesses experiencing hardship.

“You want to make sure you have pretty clear criteria that a commercial tenant actually experienced hardship,” said James Parrott, an economist at the New School. “There’s no reason the city should be subsidizing companies that didn’t experience significant hardship.”

2. At Boondoggle, Pat Garofalo writes about bipartisanship’s potential for moving interstate compacts to end corporate welfare.

20 members of the Michigan House (13 Republicans and seven Democrats), as well as nine members of the Michigan Senate (five Democrats and four Republicans) introduced legislation to form an interstate compact against corporate tax giveaways among Midwestern states. […] That brings the total number of states where compact bills have been introduced this year to 15, up from five just a couple of years ago.

3. Surprise! An audit revealed Colorado’s film tax credit resulted in millions of taxpayer dollars being misspent (Denver Business Journal).

An examination of just nine randomly chosen projects that received incentives, for example, showed that eight of them either lacked sufficient documentation to show whether they met the goals of spending a minimum amount of money in the state and employing Coloradans as at least 50 percent of their cast and crew.

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