Gov. Andrew Cuomo is very fond of giving taxpayer money to businesses. So were his predecessors, and so is the state legislature. The result: New York leads the country in state money to individual companies — by a lot — according to a study by Mercatus scholar Veronique de Rugy.
Washington State — which has given a couple of very large incentive packages to Boeing — comes in second place.
It may be more fair to divide the money by population, so as not to tilt the score against the big states. By my math — dividing de Rugy’s dollar amounts by Census population figures — Louisiana gives out the most corporate welfare per capita: $2,431.
On the per-capita measure, the five best states are Virginia, Montana, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and Hawaii.
A caveat: Some of this may just be the transparency of the corporate giveaways, as there is no central database of state subsidies.
