Tax incremental finance districts created nationwide were supposed to kick-start local economies hit by blight by offering tax savings to companies to create jobs. But Greg Leroy of Good Jobs First in Washington, D.C. is publishing a book called The Great American Jobs Scam that asserts these TIF districts have been perverted into dumb corporate giveaways that don¹t create the jobs that were promised.

[Greg LeRoy 1]: "Well, I'm talking about a system that allows companies to exact huge tax breaks and other kinds of subsidies by talking about creating good jobs, but then a system that allows companies to fail to deliver on the jobs even though they get the big tax breaks and subsidies."

Leroy says because TIF requirements have become too relaxed in their definition of blight they¹ve become a giant ripoff of both taxpayers and workers.

[LeRoy 2]: "It hurts everybody in the long run, because not only are we wasting money - giving money to companies to do things they wanted to do anyway - but we're also spending money in very inefficient, ineffective ways when we need it to be doing other things."

Missouri, Leroy says, is an especially egregious example of TIF¹s gone awry. A Republican county executive in Missouri filed a case currently before the state supreme court challenging the loose definition of blight in the creation of TIF districts there after hundreds of acres of cornfields were deemed blighted.