The Dillsboro town board allocated $25,000 for economic development incentives. They argue the place is a ghost town now that the Great Smoky Mountain Railroad has moved to Bryson City. They would like Jackson County to partner with offerings for new business. The Smoky Mountain News informs us that businesses with accounting departments too lame to know money Is fungible should be excited to know all the different forms enticements may take:

Incentives can take a number of forms. For example, they can include cash grants or property tax rebates based on the number of jobs a company creates, or they can be infrastructure subsidies, such as reduced prices on sewer or water fees.

The water authority would like to help by turning existing businesses into deadwood for clearing out:

The Tuckaseigee Water and Sewer Authority, on whose board [Mayor Mike] Fitzgerald serves, is also looking at creating some economic incentive policies. TWASA charges impact fees to new developments to help cover the cost of delivering water and sewer service, but the authority is looking at developing policies to keep those fees from deterring new businesses.

“We’ve been working on a formula to lessen the severity of the impact fees when someone opens a business. But it’s still in the production stage,” Fitzgerald said.

All this incentive garbage has me thinking (as a fool) that we could really improve the economy if, rather than measuring our standard of living in terms of GDP, we reference a GDJ, where the J stands for jobs, and the math is all crazy anyway. Half the population can get paid off the government printing press to do; the other half to undo. Oh, wait. We already did that implicitly.