Even outside of the state, the city of Charlotte still sits atop of the highly taxed hill.  Granted, the city does fair better once its fiscal figures are pitted against other major metropolitan cities, but this doesn’t exonerate the city’s officials. “Charlotte has a relatively low overall cost of doing business,” said Joe Coletti in an op-ed published in the Rhino Times, “but it lags key competitors in job and income growth.” According to Joe, the city’s tax burden is “above the national average for large cities and structured in a way that can discourage productive activity such as work and investment.”  Ironically, the taxing practices of most state and local governments are so unfair that the very people who made them find it necessary to disregard them.  Through government action, some lucky businesses get lucrative tax breaks, depending on the size and scope of the potential business. As George Leef describes in the study “Eastern North Carolina at Work,” published by North Carolina Insight, such economic development plans, aside from more optimistic than correct, usually end up hurting small, entrepreneurial businesses—a living economy’s economic engine.