Word: taxingly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...weep for Borden Chemicals. It was able to pay the fine with just a couple of years' savings from abated taxes. For over the past decade, while the plant has been fouling the land, water and air in Louisiana, the state has excused the company from paying $15 million in property taxes as part of just one of its corporate-welfare programs. A Borden spokesman said even with the exemption, the tax the company pays in Louisiana is "about average" for Southern states. Without the exemption, he says, Louisiana would no longer be "competitive as far as trying to attract...
Borden Chemicals, which years ago was part of Borden Inc., the milk-and-dairy-products company, is typical of scores of companies in Louisiana that receive tax abatements at the same time they contribute to the state's polluted environment. That pollution, in Louisiana and across the country, represents corporate welfare's greatest hidden cost. Chemicals, mining wastes and a broad range of other hazardous materials have fouled water, land and air across America. Billions have already been spent undoing environmental damage. Many more billions will be spent in coming years. Industry itself is footing part of the bill...
...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...
Thus far in the 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...
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...