The enormity of GE’s choice was not lost on local boosters, who lauded the decision. “This is better than hosting the Olympics,” wrote Shirley Leung, a Boston Globe columnist. “The world can now mention Boston in the same sentence as Silicon Valley when talking about where the future is being built.”

Unfortunately, that future comes with a stiff price tag. Together, the city and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts offered up an estimated $145 million in business incentives ($120 million in grants and other programs from the state, and another $25 million in property-tax relief from the city) to secure the deal. By my calculations, that means that the city and state are doling out a whopping $181,250 in public subsidies per job, given GE’s own statement that its new headquarters will employ 800 people (200 corporate staff members and another 600 so-called digital industrial product managers, designers, and developers). And that doesn’t even include additional incentives such as grants for workforce training (another $1 million or so), a new “innovation center” designed to better tie GE to local universities and research institutes ($5 million more), assistance for employees to relocate to Boston, and transportation improvements in the Seaport District.

Another reason for the move, hinted at by the company itself, is to allow GE to continue avoiding state corporate income tax. In fact, The Boston Globe reports that GE essentially pays no, or at least minimal, corporate income tax to any state.

What’s even more shocking is that Boston and Massachusetts have historically been reluctant to engage in this kind of corporate welfare. GE’s subsidy package is the largest ever assembled in the state’s history, according to Good Jobs First, an organization that tracks corporate incentives.

GE is also one of the largest recipients of incentives in the country, numbering already among the top 20 recipients of corporate welfare subsidies after hauling in a total of $1.5 billion since 1992 (with the majority of that accruing in just the last five years). In 2014 alone, GE received nearly $100 million in subsidies from Cincinnati and the state of Ohio, where its U.S. Global Operations Center is located.

This is not the first time GE has picked up and moved its headquarters. A little over 40 years ago, GE left Schenectady for its then-new corporate campus in Fairfield. While this latest move has Boston politicians and boosters cheering, these subsidies also take away jobs from people back in Connecticut. As Henry Pires, a worker and union representative at a soon-to-be shuttered GE valve factory in Avon, Massachusetts, told Radio Boston: “It hurts me to know that my tax money is an incentive to take jobs from someplace else.”

The reality is that these incentives are a drop in the bucket for a $250 billion company like GE. In fact, GE turned down reportedly bigger incentive packages from other states, including New York. Ultimately, all these incentives really do is take money out of the pockets of Boston and Massachusetts taxpayers—money that could and should be used to reduce poverty and improve education in the city and state’s many disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Perhaps it’s finally time for the federal government to step in and stop the incentive madness. In the meantime, GE could always do the right thing and give the taxpayers back their money. For a company that wants to be seen as both cutting-edge and a good corporate citizen, such a move would set an important precedent.

This article appears courtesy of CityLab .

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Richard Florida is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. He is a university professor in the University of Toronto’s School of Cities and Rotman School of Management, and a distinguished fellow at New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate and visiting fellow at Florida International University. Connect Facebook Twitter