Does “the media” refer to the vast, array of newspapers and television news sources?

I think there be should some published document where I can find all of these tax expenditures, because I am paying for them. I think that that document should be published by the body that is responsible for expending those taxes.

Good point. In fact, why does Winn-Dixie spend money on receipt printers, paper, and ink when the prices of some of their goods are published in the sales fliers that they send to my mailbox?

Ok, that was dumb, but here’s my point:
In order for our representative democracy to work, we have to hold our representatives in government responsible for their actions. In order to do that, we need to know what our representatives are doing. In the case of the legislature, we need to have a complete and accurate account of how much we are spending.

It seems like this would be a pretty popular view in a state that is so afraid of taxes.

If the public has the right to know how much schools or prisons cost us, shouldn’t we have the right to know how much these things cost us?

Secret use of hundreds of millions of dollars is not - whether through direct expenditures or tax expenditures. Does the public have the right to know how tax dollars are used, and does that trump the need to prevent disappointments or raised expectations among corporations?

However, to partially address your concern, a tax expenditure report might lists costs grouped by kinds of companies, or perhaps by types of tax breaks/incentives rather than list the specific companies.

And perhaps, while I would not agree that this is necessary, some particular elements of such a report might be available only to legislators. Right now, even legislators do not know the value of all the tax breaks & incentives that have been authorized.

And as I said, the rest of us are paying for them. Nobody knows how much they cost us. Some of these benefits and exemptions have been around for decades, perhaps because someone or some particular industry had the influence to get them passed. They may fit in no model of economic development and run counter to tax fairness, but still they linger. I think it would be very difficult to muster a strong argument that taxpayers shouldn’t know what these are and how much they cost.

At the very least, all of these tax breaks should have sunset provisions so that they expire unless they are renewed. Regularly. Maybe annually. Let’s review them. If a tax giveaway reflects good public policy that encourages economic development, great, let’s renew it. But don’t let a tax giveaway sit unexamined on the books for decades that the rest of us have to pay for.