Editorial

Happier Holidays Ahead

We all spent more money on Christmas than we wanted or planned to, but we shouldn’t complain. It’s unseemly to allow a concern for our wallets to dilute the proper and moral feelings that drive our generosity at this time of year. We who have received much should give much, and do it gladly.

For similar reasons we shouldn’t complain about the General Assembly’s generosity during its pre-Christmas special session when it handed out $240 million in incentives to lure the Merck vaccine plant to Durham and to cement the RJR deal for Winston-Salem. We didn’t give away $240 million to those two companies; we bought 1,000 jobs that our citizens need and deserve.

Even with the incentives, the Merck plant alone will boost North Carolina’s GDP by an estimated $66 million a year. More importantly, for the families of the people who will fill those jobs, Christmas Future will be merrier than Christmas Past.

While people do have honest differences of opinion about how far the state should go in its economic development initiatives, it’s encouraging to see that most everyone agrees that one objective — jobs — should form the cornerstone of this public policy debate. As long as jobs are the yardstick we use to measure the success of economic development programs, we can’t go far wrong.

NCCBI believes that the governor and the legislature did the right thing by aggressively courting these two new industries. But we also strongly believe that the surest way to create the greatest number of jobs is to lower the state’s high corporate income tax rate and its punitive tax rate on high-income individuals. Upwards of 200,000 North Carolina businesses are paying the third-highest corporate income tax rates in the Southeast, rates that are 50 percent higher than Texas and 33 percent higher than South Carolina.

Cutting our corporate income tax rates by one percentage point would allow North Carolina businesses to keep more than $150 million a year that they now are sending to Raleigh. That’s enough cash flow to support thousands of new jobs.

The past two years has been a dismal period for North Carolina. We lost 160,000 jobs, and as our unemployment rates soared, we didn’t seem to know how to properly respond to the unfolding human crisis.

But as 2003 ended, it was encouraging to sense that North Carolina has regained its footing. J-DIG, the state’s new-jobs rebate program, began racking up one success after another. The General Assembly took decisive action in the Merck and RJR deals.

Let’s continue that momentum into 2004 by conscripting all the existing businesses in the state in the economic development wars. Let’s cut their corporate income taxes so they can do what they do best — create jobs.  -- Steve Tuttle

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