For years, government has bent over backwards to give huge tax breaks to the world's biggest polluters. It's time for that to end.
While allies of big industry extol tax breaks as an effective and necessary tool for economic development, the fact is that the benefits remain largely unquantified while the many detriments are perfectly plain.
These include lost revenue for vital public services; tilting the playing field in favor of large, multinational corporations while small and local businesses face a higher tax burden; and trading off local investments in sustainable, long-term strategies for economic growth for uncertain short-term gains.
It's also unclear that tax breaks actually serve their stated purpose, with studies and business leaders suggesting they are a minor factor among many others considered when making location decisions.
Perhaps most importantly, because tax breaks are often negotiated behind closed doors and lack a review mechanism to ensure that all promised jobs and wages are in fact delivered, their true cost and benefit typically remain a mystery.
But when tax breaks are given to corporate polluters who put the health and safety of the communities where they operate at risk, the only real question is just how outraged taxpayers should be.
DirtyDeals.org is dedicated to ensuring that the destructive absurdity of tax breaks for polluters is exposed and ended.
Billions in Giveaways, Pennies on the Dollar for Texas Communities
Texas law allows local governments to grant billions of dollars in tax breaks to corporations – primarily in the petrochemical, chemical, and plastics industries – through three programs: Chapter 313 Value Limitation Agreements, Chapter 312 Property Tax Abatement Agreements, and Industrial District Agreements.
These following studies, produced by Autocase Economic Advisory for Texas Campaign for the Environment and other community partners, examine how those programs operate across major industrial regions of the Texas Gulf Coast. Each report analyzes the tax incentive agreements in a specific county or region, calculates the revenues that local governments, school districts, and the state forgo as a result, and assesses what those losses mean for public services and taxpayers.
Taken together, the five studies document more than $11 billion in foregone tax revenues across the Texas Gulf Coast – money that would otherwise fund schools, roads, emergency services, and other public needs. The corporations receiving the largest breaks are almost universally the region's biggest polluters, including ExxonMobil, Freeport LNG, Formosa Plastics, and Cheniere Energy, while the cost to taxpayers per job promised runs from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars per position.
Public access to these agreements remains limited by overlapping jurisdictions, bureaucratic opacity, and legal barriers, making independent analyses like these essential tools for informed public debate.