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[eagle243]

North Carolina Governor Mike Easley is praising the General Assembly for passing tax breaks for a pharmaceutical company in return for the company's promise to locate a $300M plant in Durham County. Easley was claiming that "they need our infrastructure" and made comments about the biotech research in RTP

Comments

[cramer]

There's a lot more to it than why has caught your eye. Yes, the nc gov gives the company tax breaks. However, by locating a plant and the associated jobs, etc., they are also generating a good deal more tax revenue outside those tax breaks -- income tax for one.

Tax breaks have been given to companies for decades (centuries?) to get them to bring their jobs to a specific place. There's a great deal more economy involved than just "our $36M tax dollars."[1]

[1] Textile Engineering (TE30x) final project... designing a complete yarn production plant including "complete" economic analysis. If you'd like to see the report, I can dig it out of the archive (I think) -- it's either in decwrite or framemaker, and autocad.

[eagle243]

That aspect has not escaped me. These sort of games may have been going on for years, but recently it is getting much worse.

The problem I have with it is this: our state's total tax burden is so high that we must play these stupid games and give away millions in taxpayer dollars just to lure companies here. You do realise that we live in the highest taxed county in the highest taxed state in the southeast, right?

A much better policy would be to improve infrastructure and reduce the overall tax burden - this would make us much more competitive without having to use this everybody-loses gimmickery.