It shouldn’t come as a surprise.
How Economic Development Incentives Hurt Small Businesses: States say they want to help independent businesses, but large companies take the majority of the dollars, by Richard Florida (City Lab)
… Billions of state and local economic incentive dollars seemingly aimed at small businesses flow instead to a few large, well-established, and well-connected businesses. This is yet another example of how the rapidly growing economic-development incentive game remains a perverse and useless waste of taxpayer money …
… ultimately, the study found that large companies captured between 80 and 96 percent of these small-business incentives, depending on the state in question.
In simple terms, these large companies have become sophisticated at gaming incentive dollars—including those explicitly aimed elsewhere …
