Tax credit opponents enlist Popeye
Opponents of the Missouri Legislature’s “megaproject” tax credit bill have taken their fight to YouTube. A video titled “Bombardier, eh?” uses Popeye the Sailor Man and the always-hungry Wimpy to lampoon the Canadian company that is talking about building an aircraft assembly plant near Kansas City. In one scene, Wimpy says, “I will gladly build you some planes next decade for $880 million in tax credits today.”
A more conventional piece of propaganda, titled “Bomb-a-Who,” features a narrator talking over pictures of the Canadian flag and a pile of $100 bills and warning Missourians against subsidizing “a foreign company that has had trouble managing debt in the past.”
The Kansas City Star’s PrimeBuzz blog says the tax-credit bill, which I discussed in a recent column, was on the losing end of a Senate committee vote today.
(1 votes, average: 2 out of 5)
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David Nicklaus has covered St. Louis business for more than 25 years. His column appears three days a week on the Post-Dispatch business page. 
Entertaining, but a very superficial explanation of a very complex issue, which is: To what extent should state and local governments grant subsidies to businesses to attract and keep them? A more comprehensive analysis would show that taxpayers/voters are generally schizophrenic on the issue: They want to simultaneously grant subsidies to businesses while taxing the hell out of them (ignoring the fact that the taxes that businesses pay increase the price of their product and lower the pay of their employees).
My preference is that (a) tax policies towards business should be essentially neutral (that is, that they pay the cost of government services that they receive such as roads, waste disposal and fire protection) and (b) that there be some sort of federal legislation to eliminate the bidding war for attracting new plants that goes on between various states and municipalities.