Study: Large Corporations Dominate Federal Subsidies

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Mar 17, 2015, 09:00 ET

WASHINGTON, March 17, 2015 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --Two-thirds of the $68 billion in federal business grants and special tax credits awarded over the past 15 years have gone to large corporations. During the same period, federal agencies have given the private sector hundreds of billions in loans, loan guarantees and bailouts, with three-quarters going to a dozen U.S. and foreign banks.

These are key findings of Uncle Sam's Favorite Corporations, a study released today by Good Jobs First, a non-profit/non-partisan research center in Washington, DC. They derive from the first comprehensive compilation of company-specific federal subsidy data. The database, with 164,000 awards from 137 programs, expands Good Jobs First's Subsidy Tracker, which since 2010 has posted data from states and localities. The study and database are at www.goodjobsfirst.org.

"For more than 20 years, so-called corporate welfare has been debated with little awareness of which companies were the biggest recipients," said Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy.

"Big business dominates federal subsidy spending the way it does state and local programs," said Philip Mattera, principal author of the study and creator of Subsidy Tracker.

Other findings:

* Six companies received $1 billion or more in grants and allocated tax credits (those awarded to specific companies) since 2000. Just 582 large companies account for 67 percent of the total (excluding tax breaks that cannot be attributed to individual companies). The largest recipient is Spain's Iberdrola, which received $2.2 billion for its U.S. wind farms.

* Thanks to Federal Reserve rescue programs during the financial meltdown, the face value of loans, loan guarantees and bailouts run into the trillions. This includes rollover loans, so the amounts outstanding at any time were lower but amounted to hundreds of billions. The biggest bailout recipient is Bank of America, with $3.5 trillion (excluding repayments), followed by Citigroup ($2.6 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2.1 trillion) and JPMorgan Chase ($1.3 trillion).

* Five companies are among the top 50 recipients of federal AND state/local subsidies: Boeing, Ford Motor, General Electric, General Motors and JPMorgan Chase.

* Ten of the 50 parent companies receiving the most in federal grants and tax credits are foreign-based.

* One-quarter of the 100 largest for-profit federal contractors got subsidies, with the most going to General Electric and Boeing.

* Federal subsidies have gone to several companies reincorporated abroad to avoid U.S. taxes.

Contact: Philip Mattera 202-232-1616 ext212; [email protected]

SOURCE Good Jobs First