Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Rick Perry's $487 million corporate slush fund doesn't need your stinkin' audit

The Texas governor doesn't agree that his corporate-handout fund needs an audit—because he and two other GOP pols already monitor it.

Dana Liebelson | Mother Jones
20 March 2013

snip

 Perry maintains that the fund gives Texas a competitive edge and has brought more than 56,000 new jobs to the state and generated more than $14.7 billion in capital investment. But the watchdog group Texans for Public Justice found that by the end of 2010, companies getting cash from the fund were only creating about 37 percent of the number of jobs promised. The administration has lowered standards in the past so that companies could create fewer jobs than they had promised, and it has canceled contracts after criticism over companies such as Bank of America's Countrywide, which continued to be an Enterprise grantee as it collapsed and laid off thousands of workers nationwide.


snip

"Perry's office is basically accommodating a process by which taxpayer money is transferred to corporations, not invested in state infrastructure," says Matt Angle, the director of the Lone Star Project, a political action committee devoted to strategic communications and research for Democrats. He would like to see Enterprise funds start going to education, family planning, and roads. (In 2011, Perry cut $5.4 billion in state funding from public schools, and he is turning down $100 billion to expand Medicaid while also shuttering 53 family planning clinics.)"

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