Here’s an easy way to cut government waste: stop corporations from playing states against each other. According to a new Good Jobs First study, The Job-Creation Shell Game, too many states are playing expensive bidding games against each other to take jobs that already exist in other states. Some examples:

• In the Kansas City metro area, companies have been getting eight-figure subsidy packages to move from the Missouri side to Kansas, or vice versa.
• In Texas, the “deal-closing” Texas Enterprise Fund as well as a privately financed marketing group called TexasOne are used to brazenly lure companies from many states, including California.
• New Jersey has doubled down on both job piracy and job blackmail payoffs, continuing to lure firms from New York City-many of them Wall Street firms that were likely to come anyway.
• Georgia, which we rename the Poach State, stunned officials in Ohio when it successfully lured the headquarters of NCR from Dayton, where the company had been based for 125 years.
• Tennessee embodies all the policy contradictions. Its largest city, Memphis, is frequently the victim of poaching by bordering Mississippi, yet Tennessee created a whole new subsidy program to lure the North American headquarters of Nissan from southern California.
• The booming Charlotte region has job growth most states would die for. Yet instead of managing their growth, the 16 counties in North Carolina and South Carolina routinely poach jobs from each other, using both state and local subsidies.
• Rhode Island has long pirated jobs from Massachusetts, but when it gave a very large package to lure video game maker 38 Studios, founded by retired Boston Red Sox star Curt Schilling, the deal soon blew up and criminal prosecutions are now under way.
• Huge job blackmail subsidies have left many taxpayers bitter in states such as Illinois and Ohio, and Sears Holding Corp. has continued to shed jobs despite getting a second nine-figure retention deal from Illinois.

What can we do to stop this madness? One simple solution is for more states to opt out of the game. Currently,

four-fifths of the states already refuse to pay for intrastate job relocations. For at least one and sometimes most of their major incentive programs, 40 states disallow subsidies for existing jobs that are merely being moved within their own borders.

To help them move in this direction and help level the playing field, the report also suggests that the feds give them a gentle nudge by

reserving a small portion of its economic development aid for those states that amend their incentive codes to make existing jobs ineligible for subsidies and certify that they no longer engage in raiding.

You could also try to rally conservatives to lead the assault. After all, corporate bidding wars among states are one of the worst kinds of government interventions in the market, so any true small government conservative ought to be dead set against them. I’m sure any day now ALEC will take up the cause…