Comments about ‘Utah incentives total $148 million to spur growth’

Wonderful article. This is very encouraging news for Utah businesses, especially since the program is based on such a sound model.

"one thing that companies look at is the quality of the work force."

Nice fact to bring out. What this means is that the quality of education in the state is central to the local work force. Hope the legislature reads that. Sometimes it is a lot easiy to just pass another tax cut to corporations as an incentive rather than build the true "engine" of business development.

Some things left out of this article: Companies also seek out the quality of elementary and secondary education in determining new locations for their operations. To attract good employees, companies want to make sure their employees like the schools that their children will be a part of.

Finally, companies check out quality of life. eBay almost did not come to Utah due to the state's poor air quality. This should be a wake up call regarding how we deal with local air quality. It would be interesting to study how many companies have not come to Utah due to our air pollution. GOED probably has the stats, but won't release them to embarrass the state.

It's nice that Utah does incentives more responsibly than other states, but I still don't think they're appropriate.

Why do large businesses from out of state get millions of dollars in tax breaks but smaller companies that have been her for years contributing to the economy don't get them? Are these bigger businesses more worthy of special government treatment than other companies?

Also, I often hear how much these tax breaks "should" bring in economic benefit, but I never hear how much they "actually" bring in? Is anyone keeping track of this? Do we know if these companies would come without the tax break? It's not like they would turn one down even if they would come. This corporate welfare program has too many unanswered questions for me to support it.

Lets carry out this experiment further. If the few companies that got tax breaks (I would assume on corporate taxes) were able to result in $2 of new taxes for every $1 in tax breaks, what would happen if all companies in Utah were given the same tax break? Even if it resulted in $1.10 for every $1 lost, isn't that a winning situation?