Good Jobs First

"Ultimately, it isn’t a good idea to allow a billionaire corporation to build and profit from a stadium without paying property taxes on it,” Good Jobs First's Kristan Wong Karinen told the Chicago Tribune.
The megaprojects bill that would have redirected money from residents to the wealthy owners of the Chicago Bears would have had much broader consequences than just a single wasteful stadium subsidy - it would have given tax breaks to almost any major development. Other taxpayers would be picking up their portion, or services would be cut.

Mayor Brandon Johnson sees opening in latest stadium proposal to keep Bears in Chicago After Illinois lawmakers failed to pass legislation to help the Chicago Bears move to Arlington Heights, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson welcomed a new proposal as an opening to reconsider Chicago as th...

“Every dollar we subsidize a big tech company is a dollar we can’t put into public schools,” Good Jobs First's Anthony Elmo told KTSM 9 News.
Over the next two years, Texas is expected to lose over $3 billion to data center tax breaks.

“These numbers confirm that lawmakers were working with wildly inaccurate information,” said Zach Schiller, research director at Policy Matters Ohio. “Forecasts weren’t just off — they missed the mark by more than a billion dollars, undermining responsible policymaking and public trust.”

Ohio residents lost out on $1.4 billion to data center tax breaks in 2025, Signal Ohio reports.

🟥 DATA CENTER COMPANY RAP SHEETS 🟥
Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker, our wide-ranging database chronicling corporate misconduct, shows that several of the largest companies building, financing, operating, or occupying U.S. data centers have accumulated *billions* of dollars in penalties for wrongdoing.
The same corporations now promising jobs and innovation have been penalized for privacy violations, wage and hour violations, anti-competitive practices, environmental violations, False Claims Act cases (defrauding the federal government), and more.
Meta, one of the companies expanding AI infrastructure, has racked up over $8 billion in regulatory penalties since 2000. It has the largest settlement to date for privacy violations totaling $5 billion for illegally sharing users’ personal data.
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has been penalized nearly $4.7 billion since 2000 for offenses related to privacy, discrimination, and more. It has paid nearly $2.8 billion to settle several lawsuits that alleged unlawful tracking and collecting of data. Outside of privacy violations, Google has accrued penalties of nearly $1.5 billion for consumer protection violations where it was alleged to have increased costs for consumers and developers through monopolistic conduct in its app store.
Microsoft’s penalties total nearly $1.6 billion, the largest of which came from price-fixing violations in which it used its dominant market position to hamper competition for computer software.
Oracle, the company behind the massive “Stargate” data center projects, has paid out one of the highest amounts of back wages and penalties for wage and hour violations of all the companies involved in data center development: over $117 million for allegedly failing to pay its workers overtime and paying female employees less than their male counterparts (it’s worth noting fines against companies cheating workers out of pay are notoriously low). Oracle also has the largest settlements related to the False Claims Act for charging the government higher prices for its products than commercial clients.

Jealous that Chicago Bears’ wealthy owners seem poised to get hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars, other wealthy developers want in.
It’s like when one NFL owner gets a sweetheart stadium deal and suddenly every other billionaire owner starts eyeing the same playbook — using public money to gold-plate stadiums with luxury perks while ticket prices, parking, and concessions get pushed out of reach for regular fans. We pay more, and get less.
Good Jobs First and ITEP wrote about why a proposed new bill is such a loss for Illinois residents.

Companies like Amazon, which have extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpyayers here, are racing to get more tax breaks that last into the 2050s before the moratorium goes into effect.

Hillsboro Mayor Beach Pace said Monday the city will stop signing enterprise zone tax break agreements with data centers until next month, and perhaps indefinitely.

https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2026/05/hillsboro-mayor-orders-halt-to-new-data-center-tax-breaks.html?utm_campaign=theoregonian_sf&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook

“It’s the biggest capital expenditure since the Manhattan Project, and it isn’t going to create tens of thousands of jobs in the long term,” Good Jobs First's Elmo told The Verge. “It’s not some economic boom. Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, Oracle, they’re shedding jobs in real time while spending billions on data centers so that other organizations can shed additional jobs through AI. At some point, people need to ask more critical questions about this.”
📷: panuma nikhomkhai from Pexels via Canva

Check out the full episode! https://open.spotify.com/episode/1HfQSkw6iu0AOPS5tnDUkQ

Join Computer Talk with TAB this Saturday, May 9th, at 10:00 a.m. for an exclusive interview with Greg LeRoy from Good Jobs First. We'll dive into datacenter tax breaks and explore why their true costs are so difficult to account for. Tune in on WTIC News/Talk 1080, the Audacy app, or Facebook Live.

Every year, local governments and school districts spend billions of our public dollars on everything from roads and schools to pencils and copy paper. In theory, those contracts are supposed to go through a transparent competitive bidding process that ensures multiple (local) businesses a fair shot.
But increasingly, Amazon is bypassing that process, using its market power and opaque pricing practices to become the default government vendor.
And we're all paying the price.
A new report from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that governments and school districts are frequently paying wildly different prices for the exact same products, sometimes on the very same day.
Some examples:
📌 Pittsburgh Schools paid $57.99 for cases of Kleenex while Denver Schools paid $36.91 for the same product.
📌 Two employees in Iowa City ordered identical Frito-Lay snack cartons — one paid $26.22, the other $34.31.
📌 Fauquier County Schools in Virginia bought the same Amazon Basics copy paper in the same week for both $34.99 and $45 per case.
📌 Clark County, Washington, paid $146,000 for computer monitors Amazon sold for 17% less on another day — a $24,000 difference.
📌 Denver Schools bought identical dry-erase markers in separate orders and paid $114 for one order and $149 for the other.
This isn’t “efficiency.” It’s dynamic pricing with public dollars.
We spoke with report co-author Kennedy Smith about what’s happening, and what local governments and school districts can do instead to strengthen local economies, support independent businesses, and make sure our money actually serves us.

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