States Can (and Now Must!) Lead on Reforming Corporate Welfare

2025 Work Plan: Silencing Billionaires, Amplifying Workers

December 30, 2024

A collage of workers including a construction worker, a teacher, a home care worker and a warehouse worker.
Source: Getty Images Signature

All over America, groups are preparing for big state revenue fights in 2025.

Will you help us help them?

Washington won’t be helping. Pandemic-era aid like CARES, ARPA, and the infrastructure bill that have boosted the economy will run out. Instead, the incoming Trump administration and Congressional leaders intend to impose austerity: big spending cuts upon education, healthcare, housing, and infrastructure.

They also intend to extend the 2017 Trump tax cut bill that grossly favored multinational corporations and the One Percent. That bill, never the subject of a public hearing, included Opportunity Zones, or what we call “Trickle-Down Economics by Census Tract.”

But as we proved in a unique study in Ohio, Opportunity Zones favor gentrifying parts of already-growing cities, not poor, rural, or Appalachian parts of the Buckeye State.

So Uncle Sam will be in the business of growing inequality for at least the next two years. That means states and localities are where good things must keep happening.

That’s where we have always spent most of our energy: see our 50 State Profiles for just one part of our massive toolkit.

We just issued the largest survey ever of small- and medium-sized cities’ transparency practices, and we will be doing much more with them in 2025 and 2026.

School districts in low-income communities face especially daunting times. They got extra aid from stimulus bills, but it runs out next month. That’s why we’ll keep issuing studies proving that majority-Black and Brown student bodies get hurt the most by tax abatements — and they benefit the most from abatement reforms.

When more governments, like those in New York City and also in San Diego County, use our wage theft data and assistance to name and punish companies that steal workers’ wages, we’ll send word.

If bad ideas for new giveaways are proposed, like film production tax credits or new tax increment financing (TIF) districts, our heavily read FAQs will be ready.

If you value what we do — organizer-friendly insights on corporate misconduct and how public monies actually flow — we need your help so we can keep assisting state and local coalitions and public officials.

Will you help us help them?

In Solidarity,

Greg LeRoy