The tax break game

Here we go again.

For years the state has played this sucker’s game of allocating financial benefits — grants, credits, and other tax breaks — to politically favored companies and industries. And for years hapless taxpayers have seen their dollars squandered to enrich firms that slashed employment instead of growing it, or funneled into unneeded “incentives’’ for development that would occur even without a penny of state money.

Beacon Hill’s confidence in its ability to successfully pick marketplace winners and losers is boundless. So is its inability to grasp that it cannot confer any financial benefit on X without imposing a simultaneous financial cost on Y. No matter how often state government bets wrong, ladling taxpayer-funded goodies to industries that don’t fulfill their boosters’ rosy predictions, bureaucrats and politicians remain convinced that gambling with public funds is good policy.

Faith in the wisdom of doling out lucrative tax breaks to privileged businesses wasn’t daunted when Evergreen Solar Inc. announced in January that it was laying off more than 800 employees and shutting its “green energy’’ plant in Devens — a plant it had built with more than $30 million in state subsidies, and the promise of nearly $30 million more.