Word: louisiana
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...better understand the link between corporate welfare and pollution, let's take a closer look at Louisiana, a state that hands out tax breaks to companies that have been repeatedly fined or cited for discharging hazardous chemicals or for generating large amounts of toxic waste. Louisiana has been canceling taxes owed by industry ever since the Great Depression. But, as elsewhere, the exemptions have soared over the past decade...
...1990s, a TIME analysis shows, the state has wiped off the books $3.1 billion in property taxes alone. That's 14 times the amount the state excused in the 1960s and doesn't include all the other types of tax breaks granted to corporations. That makes Louisiana No. 1 in terms of subsidies per capita. Some of the big beneficiaries include Lucent Technologies, Uniroyal Chemical, Willamette Industries, PPG Industries and Georgia Gulf Corp. Paul Templet, a professor of environmental studies at Louisiana State University, has measured business subsidies across the country. His sobering conclusion: "The states that offer the least...
Plenty of states pass out tax breaks, of course, even to polluters whose mess taxpayers must later clean up. But Louisiana's incentive program has an odd twist: the tax abatements are intended to help start-up businesses. The purpose of the industrial-tax-exemption program, in the state's own words, is to offer "to industry certain tax benefits at the most critical stage of any business endeavor--the beginning...
While government officials across the country publicly embrace tax-abatement programs like Louisiana's, the employees involved in the actual administration of them are often quietly critical. In Louisiana, as in other states, TIME encountered those outraged by the escalating handouts but fearful of losing their jobs and powerless to stop the process. A Baton Rouge state official, who agreed to talk anonymously, said some companies today practice a form of "extortion" in Louisiana--they demand tax breaks yet give back very little in return. At one time, he said, companies might actually create new jobs in exchange...
...quick to say that Louisiana on its own cannot stop the handouts if other states don't join in. "We'd be killed...