Smells like teen petulance: Adams pulls his corporate welfare tax give-away plan

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

"Captain Kool-Aid," House Speaker Kirk Adams, R-Mesa, has decided to pull the plug on HB 2250, his corporate welfare tax give-away plan. Adams said he already had compromised and was unwilling to give up any more. "I couldn't deliver the entire package." So he said, 'Let's quit.' " House speaker pulls plug on tax breaks:

That move provoked an angry reaction from some senators.

"It comes across as a petulant, immature teen-ager who says, 'I'm going to take my ball and go home,' " said Sen. Carolyn Allen, R-Scottsdale.

Allen said the chances for a deal were still possible when Adams killed his own measure "if cooler heads could prevail."

"But, [nooooo], he has to have it all," she said.

Central to HB 2250 is Adams' premise, based on an economic study, that the state needs a more business-friendly climate to attract and retain jobs. Adams specifically sought to diversify the economy to move it further away from construction and growth.

The compromise package included a 28 percent cut in corporate income taxes and various changes in how some companies compute what they owe the state. It also scrapped the state property tax and shifted the cost of future local government and school district bond issues and overrides from businesses to homeowners.

This is the ideological Kool-Aid of supply-side "trickle down" GOP economics which has been entirely disproved and discredited over the past decade. "The problem, Adams said, is a 'philosophical issue with tax reductions' among many Republican senators." What he really means is that not everyone is drinking his ideological Kool-Aid.

Harvard economist Joseph Kalt says experience has shown that we'd be better off spending our time and money on improving our school system, fixing potholes and beautifying Speedway medians. Gov't efforts to lure firms called ineffective:

Kalt said studies of state and municipal initiatives to direct the kind of business growth they will have show the initiatives don't work. Studies also show that the people at the top of corporations go where they want to live. And that, he said, depends foremost on quality of life, especially quality of education, both K-12 and at universities.

Kalt said universities are a great asset in seeding the attraction of "top feeder" corporations. He said it was MIT, rather than Harvard, that lifted Boston out of its post-industrial Rust Belt decline, sparking a technology boom known as Route 128, the Silicon Valley of the Northeast. That boom then brought other people who wanted to live in the thriving place that was created.

Preserving and furthering the same qualities that brought many of those in the audience to Arizona would be critical, Kalt said, to recruiting businesses that would create good jobs. He wrapped up by saying better leadership is needed, but that "we get the leadership the system rewards."

The Arizona Legislature has done exactly the opposite with draconian cuts to primary, secondary and university education budgets, and eliminating some public-private business incubator projects on the "philosophical issue" that government should not pick winners and losers in the "free market" economy. GOP economic philosophy is destroying this state and the country. It is time to consign this failed economic theory to the ash heap of history and face economic reality.

If House Speaker Adam's corporate welfare tax give-away plan is truly dead — it ain't over until sine die — then this should make it easier for voters to support the one cent sales tax increase on the ballot in the special election on May 18 in the hope that two-thirds of the tax will actually go towards filling the gap in education spending as Prop. 100 ostensibly promises to do (without any guaranty).