Fair  Taxes  LA

🔷 The amount of dollars exempted by ITEP has no statistically significant relationship to personal income growth. That is, the parishes where personal incomes rose the most often had the lowest ITEP utilization, after controlling for other factors and vice versa.

🔷 Results support the conclusion that the wider economic benefits of ITEP are overstated, relying on inflated and unsubstantiated indirect and induced job claims.

🔷 ITEP dollars are partially invested in industries that are broadly in decline due to automation or outsourcing. US employment in petrochemical manufacturing is lower in 2022thanit was in 1990. This suggests that continuing to invest ITEP dollars in petrochemical projects is a losing proposition for the state’s residents and future workforce, chasing an ever-larger piece of a shrinking pie.

🔷 Louisiana’s economy is likely over-reliant on the petrochemical industry. Louisiana has a muchhigher petrochemical gross domestic product (GDP) per capita ratio than any other state, including Texas. Over-reliance on petrochemicals may make the state’s economyless resilient to global trends and boom-bust cycles in the industry. This calls into question whether ITEP has helped support a continued lack of diversification in Louisiana’s economy by giving large tax advantages to specific types of manufacturing industries.

🔷 GDP produced by the petrochemical industry does not translate into earnings for local workers. Parishes that have had large portions of their revenue exempted to construct plants have retained a very low percent of their per capita GDP as worker earnings. Electively, local communities give up tax revenue to support companies who export most of the value of their product out of the state. In other cases this may increase inequality within the state as plant workers take their incomes to nearby, wealthier suburban parishes outside of the community losing tax revenue.

🔷 Finally, because ITEP has generally been used to promote the growth of petrochemical industries that have a history of environmental pollution, it is likely that a side e ect of the program has been that Louisiana’s taxpayers have indirectly subsidized the destruction of their own environment and health.