Aluminum beverage packaging company Ball Corporation and power technology company Smart Wires this week announced new sites in the Tar Heel State.  While the companies’ decisions to invest in North Carolina are exciting, the deals were enveloped with harmful corporate welfare.

Gov. Cooper welcomed the companies to the tune of more than $3 million of handouts for Ball Corporation and $2.8 million for Smart Wires.

Cooper has once again declared corporate winners for his state at the expense of taxpayers and small businesses.  North Carolina is a business friendly state, thanks to a decade of conservative tax reforms.  Unfortunately, however, the governor’s crony handouts provide unfair tax breaks to large corporations.  Targeting individual businesses with such preferential treatment artificially shifts economic power to those businesses, at everyone else’s expense.

These examples are par for the course for Cooper who has given hundreds of millions of dollars in tax incentives in this year alone, while hypocritically proclaiming his opposition to “corporate tax giveaways.”   My colleague Brian Balfour recently logged the governor’s astonishing fictions here.

Cooper’s actions this week further expose the blatant support of corporate tax giveaways for some of his choosing, at the expense of others.  Though Cooper himself claimed “corporate giveaways and tax cuts for the wealthiest come at a high cost for middle-class families,” his actions are an unabashed about face.