Julia #AntiChristoFascist

Ohio sacrificed a whopping $1.6 billion in state-level sales tax revenue for 2025 to appeal to data centers in a massive corporate handout. The original estimate in foregone revenue was supposed to be only $136 million. That means state fiscal projections were off by more than 1,000%. This is obviously budget malfeasance. Everyone in the USA should find this unacceptable. I wouldn't be shocked if backdoor deals and bribes were involved. If you take that $1.6 billion in uncollected tax money and you calculate it as if Ohio had collected it and shared it normally, then Ohio public schools would've received around $374 million (which is about $262 extra for every single student). Btw, the $1.6 billion figure covers ONLY the state-level sales tax revenue, so if you factor in other waived taxes and property tax abatements, the total handout is even higher. Instead of letting tech companies skip out on billions in taxes, that money should be helping local schools buy books, pay teachers, and improve classrooms.

Here's a link to a report that reveals how data center tax subsidies in the US ballooned nationwide into multi-billion-dollar state losses: goodjobsfirst.org/data-cente…

Data center subsidies ballooned to insane amounts this year. The data center tax exemptions include $2.5 billion in Georgia and $1.3 billion in Texas for FY2026, and nearly $2 billion in Virginia for FY2025. A lot of these data center tax exemptions are costing state budgets 10 to 20 times more in revenue than initially projected. This forgone tax revenue is a textbook example of shameless corporate welfare. These billions of dollars could be funding American schools, housing, healthcare, transit, etc. Not to mention the fact that data centers draw massive amounts of electricity and water, and the cost of these grid upgrades is blatantly being passed down to households and rate-payers through higher monthly utility bills. We're getting robbed blind, America.

Data centers are (mostly) automated server warehouses that require very few workers after construction ends. States are spending over $1 million in tax breaks for every individual long-term job that's created. It's a terrible trade-off.