“…AND IF YOU EVER LEAVE ME I WILL LOSE MY MIND…”

5/18/11

This morning’s (i.e., Wednesday, 5/18’s) Chicago Tribune reports that, so far in 2011, the state of Illinois has dispensed $230 mm in tax breaks and other aid, primarily through Economic Development for a Growing Economy (EDGE) program, a moniker doubtless concocted for a princely sum by a politically connected marketing/PR firm. This is nearly the amount shoveled out during all of 2010 in connection with such efforts.

The formula the state of Illinois is following is a classic prescription for any Chicago politician, or any self-aggrandizing politician (Using “self-aggrandizing” as an adjective with “politician” is the portrait of redundancy, but I digress.) for that matter: make life intolerable for business through a combination of high taxes, busybody regulation, and indecipherable and onerous workers’ compensation rules, but then make life easier for those businesses that come to the politicians on bended knee asking for relief. Then remind those beneficiaries of the pols’ beneficence at fundraising (i.e., all of the) time. Legions of gangsters have gone to jail for similar behavior conducted on a much smaller scale.

Don’t be surprised when it is the same “populist” Pat Quinn types who piously decry the cost, and very existence, of “corporate welfare” when election time rolls around, adding hypocrisy to extortion on their list of what would be crimes in any civilized society in which the citizenry paid attention.

One could argue that Illinois must engage in such “incentivizing” to either attract business to the state or keep business in the state, and there is doubtless something to that. But one wonders the degree to which states that are fiscally sound, low tax polities that treat businesses and people who work fairly have to bribe businesses to stay or locate within their borders. One would hope that, rather than compete with each other for the juiciness of the tax breaks the politicasters can dispense to those who are expected to return the favors at election time, states would compete for businesses and residents by working to make themselves the types of places businesses, and the people who work for them, would like to reside. By this I have in mind low taxes and efficient delivery of basic services rather than, as the politicians would interpret it, adding to the public payroll in order to “address the concerns of the business, educational, and non-profit communities” and to “meet the (ever growing) needs of those who work pay check to pay check” or some such drivelous politico-speak.