Is that a good deal for Google? For Lenior? Seems a fair question:
“We have given away the farm and have gotten almost nothing in return,” said Lenoir City Council member T.J. Rohr, who voted against the local tax incentives — although he said he was “thrilled” that Google chose Lenoir.
The legislature’s Fiscal Research Division estimated that state incentives could total $100 million.
Caldwell County and Lenoir will grant incentives worth three decades of the personal property tax and 80 percent of the real estate tax the company would have paid. …
Tax breaks for businesses keep increasing, said Bob Orr, director of the N.C. Institute for Constitutional Law and a longtime opponent of economic incentives.
“Google — how much are they worth? They’re worth billions,” Orr said. “Local governments need the money to pay teachers, law enforcement, Medicaid costs. “It’s a fundamentally unfair action disguised as, ‘This is all about job creation.’ “
That is the bottomline — taxes that Google would have paid will now have to be paid by someone else. There is no magic here. State and local officials do not seem to understand that taking the tax money of thousands, millions even, of North Carolina taxpayers and laundering it through Google in order to give 200 people jobs is not some wonderfully innovative approach to governance. It is merely tired, old machine politics, 2007 style.
