Cooper Cozies Up to ‘Corporate Cash Giveaways’, Spends $100K to Entice Amazon HQ2

RALEIGH – Well the competition to see who can land Amazon’s HQ2 is heating up and bureaucrats at the N.C. Department of Commerce thought it’d be a good idea to spend nearly $100,000 on ads in a naive attempt to seal the deal.

The campaign, including the obligatory cutesy hashtag push, is aimed at tipping the scales despite the fact that Amazon explicitly required millions in tax giveaways to even be considered.

“North Carolina is reaching all the way across the country to promote its bid to land Amazon’s second headquarters, with advertisements running on city buses in the company’s own backyard of Seattle.

The series of bus ads that began circulating earlier this month promote North Carolina’s “firsts” beyond its best-known claim to have been first in flight – such as the first public university, first state-funded art museum, and invention of the prosthetic hand with individual finger control, the “Ctrl-Alt-Del” reboot computer command, and the bar code.

The bus ads are part of a broader campaign to attract businesses, including Amazon, called N.C. Next Firsts. The state commerce department and the Economic Development Partnership of N.C. are spending about $92,000 on the campaign, which includes digital ads, social media, public relations and T-shirts.”

T-shirts? The State is spending money on T-Shirts to convince a corporate behemoth that North Carolina is a good location for their new headquarters.

This is ridiculous. If we don’t ‘win’ this competition, all this money to entice Amazon is money down the drain. What’s worse is that if we do ‘win’ the competition it only means taxpayers will foot the bill for an unprecedented incentive package never before seen in North Carolina.

Wasn’t Roy Cooper elected on a promise to stop ‘corporate cash giveaways’?

It’s not worth it. Instead, Cooper and the economic development bureaucrats should spend their efforts advocating for further tax cuts that attract companies like Amazon and treat individual taxpayers and North Carolina businesses fairly.

To that point, North Carolina was just ranked the top state in the nation in Forbes 2017 economic climate rankings – isn’t that enough for Amazon? If not, then they should rightly go somewhere else to take advantage of hardworking taxpayers.

Win the State picks winners and losers, taxpayers are always the losers.

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