The county has done business with each of the top 10 recipients of local and state subsidies in California, records show.

Tesla received $20 million in tax breaks and other subsidies to locate a plant in California

The practice is common, although hardly in violation of any rules. But across the state, groups that have received breaks are getting deals to do business, with taxpayers effectively signing two sets of checks to some of the largest, well-capitalized companies in the world.

Oracle received a contract in 2011 for project management software to monitor L.A. County’s $40 million transit and highway expansion project. Oracle has also received $7.5 million in tax breaks and subsidies in the state since 1996.

In the city of San Diego, subsidized vendors included Time Warner, which had a cable internet contract in 2014, as well as software maker Oracle and defense behemoth Northrop Grumman Systems, which had contracts in 2012.

Northrop Grumman has cleaned up there; the $593,388 in city contracts over the past three years came as the company has received $429 million in subsidies statewide.

CalWatchdog compared local government vendor data to the numbers gathered by the subsidy watchdog group Good Jobs First. By the group’s tally, state and local subsidies in California topped $2 billion in recent years, with information focused on the period since 2012 plus some awards back to the mid-‘90s.

The state subsidies list is dominated by heavyweights: Walt Disney, Comcast, Anschutz Company, Viacom, Time Warner, Virgin, Lockheed Martin, Samsung, Northrop Grumman and Oracle.

Most of the top 10 can be found among the Fortune 500, a ranking based on revenues. California taxpayers helped get them there, through breaks, allowances, training allotments and delays on taxation. (Voice of San Diego did a good assessment of California’s many subsidy programs last fall.)

In exchange, the body giving the break, be it the state or a municipality, hopes for employment and tax revenue that will put it ahead of the game. Job creation mandates are sometimes part of the deal — that is, upon the creation of a number of jobs, the subsidy is given. Major corporations have teams that work full-time on such equations.

California ranks lower than most with regard to size and scope on a statewide basis.

“Although California has often been on the losing end of interstate job piracy, the state generally does not offer major state subsidy packages to individual companies,” according to a report by Good Jobs First. “And contrary to the norm, it has only a few programs of any significance.”

Often found near the bottom of rankings for business climate, the state has had a mixed experience with subsidies.

Subsidy programs in Tennessee and Texas were used to woo Nissan and Toyota, once a major part of the state’s proud auto company portfolio, away from California. Those were the highest-profile moves among a number of corporate headquarters defections from California in the past 10 years.

The state recently passed legislation to give $330 million worth of inducements to get the entertainment industry back, after losing business to the growing number of states with film incentive programs.

Even by handing over government contracts to the already-subsidized companies, incentives are a gamble.

The state’s glaring example of unintended consequences has been with Tesla, which in 2010 received a package of incentives worth $20 million when the company took over part of the empty NUMMI auto manufacturing plant in Fremont.

An article at the time by the San Francisco Business Times noted, “Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the deal for NUMMI was made possible by tax incentives and credited Treasurer Bill Lockyer for finding available incentives.”

The party was disrupted in May, when it was revealed that Tesla was benefitting from $4.9 billion in government subsidies across the U.S., including those from California. It is considered by many an outsized allotment for an industry – electric vehicles – that has no solid base at this point.

At the same time, there have been winners.

The California Valley Solar Ranch developed by NRG Energy was granted a property tax break by San Luis Obispo County worth $14 million, and is now performing above expectations, generating up to 4 percent more than the 600,000 kilowatt hours a year that were projected.

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com

But Tesla demanded — and won — so many breaks from the state of Nevada that the deal is an affront to any true believer in free-market economics. This is from the Chronicle:

Nevada won the fierce, five-state competition to host Tesla Motors’ planned $5 billion battery factory by offering a package of tax breaks and credits that could be worth $1.2 billion over the next 20 years, according to terms released by state officials Thursday. … Tesla won’t have to pay sales tax for 20 years. The company also won’t have to pay real property, personal property and modified business taxes for 10 years.

The size of the deal and the scope of the tax breaks makes this feel more like South Korean crony capitalism — the government in Seoul is a de facto partner of conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai — then American capitalism.

But as Dan Morain points out in his Sac Bee column, this is increasingly common:

Nevada is simply following a trend. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization, Good Jobs First, tracks such giveaways. Tennessee gave Volkswagen $554 million in incentives. Mississippi gave a $1.3 billion package to Nissan in 2000. Oregon gave $2 billion in incentives to Intel.

“Unfortunately, it is common to see subsidies of this size,” Leigh McIlvaine, a research analyst for Good Jobs First. “There seems to be a perception on behalf of companies that they should be paid by the public sector to finance that growth. It is looking like an entitlement.”

California lawmakers are not shy about opening the treasury to help companies. They approved $420 million in tax breaks this summer for Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, on condition that they build new bombers in California.

Milton Friedman: Big biz a foe of free market

I get the argument that Tesla is a unique company, and that Northrop and Lockheed are fairly unique as well, so the argument that these government gifts are hugely unfair to their rivals isn’t as apt as it when it’s made about tax breaks given to specific companies in more competitive industries. But at some point, I share Milton Friedman’s concerns, as noted by the Heartland Institute in 2012, about government and industry acting in synch.

Friedman exemplified the generous spirit behind the desire for free markets: they benefit the less-wealthy by leveling the playing field, allowing people to succeed on their merits instead of through political power bought with big money. Friedman had nothing but contempt for crony capitalism and the use of government to suppress market competition, although he was too polite and good-natured to express that feeling in any way but through sound economic arguments.

Friedman himself put this sentiment another way in a 1977 article for Reason magazine:

The two greatest enemies of free enterprise in the United States … have been, on the one hand, my fellow intellectuals and, on the other hand, the business corporations of this country.

Maybe it’s pointless to worry about this six years after the federal takeover of the banking system, General Motors and Chrysler during the financial crisis, but there’s something really ominous about big government partnering with and/or propping up certain favored big businesses.

The initiatives they work on then become, in the lexicon of 2008, “too big to fail.” It’s not hard to imagine Nevada moving from tax breaks to direct subsidies if the Tesla “gigafactory” struggles to live up to its billing and needs help to survive — taxpayer help.

That is, much, much more taxpayer help.