Our country is long past desperate for jobs, and the tools we’ve got for creating them aren’t working. With nearly one in ten Americans out of work and Congress floundering to pass a jobs bill, it has fallen to cash-strapped states to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, many states’ job creation programs are nothing more than a shadowy network of corporate ATMs that hand out hundreds of millions in subsidies each year without bothering to ensure that the money goes toward creating jobs, let alone quality jobs.
A new report from New York Jobs with Justice, Urban Agenda and the Coalition for Economic Justice demonstrates how New York’s main job creation entities, Industrial Development Agencies (IDAs) have taken advantage of a lack of public scrutiny to spend more and more money while creating fewer and fewer jobs. According to the report, entitled No Return on Our Investment: The Failure of New York’s Industrial Development Agencies, IDAs waste $135 million a year on subsidies to businesses that cut jobs or fail to create them, and over 80% of IDA spending results in net revenue loss to local government.
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