Both the N&R and the Winston-Salem Journal run big Sunday front-pagers on the demise of Dell’s Forsyth County plant. JLF president John Hood makes an appearance in the Journal’s article, which focuses on the debate surrounding economic incentives:
“Public officials ought to focus on broad policies that boost the prospects of all businesses, large and small, rather than trying to cut risky side deals with individual, politically favored companies,” said John Hood, the president of the John Locke Foundation, a libertarian policy-research group in Raleigh.
“The problem is local governments, other firms, and workers all made costly decisions — about relocations, services and investments — based on the assumption that there was a long-term deal with Dell. You can’t claw all those costs back, because they aren’t in the original contract.”
What jumped out at me in the N&R story was Piedmont Triad International Airport chairman Henry Isaacson’s statement that he was “very, very sure” that the FedEx hub would become —as the N&R paraphrased —- the “kind of magnet for other businesses that its backers have promoted for more than a decade.”
They said the same thing about Dell. As for Gov. Bev Perdue’s ongoing defense of economic incentives, my Mom had an old saying —- if they stuck their head in the oven, would you do it too?
