While I’m surprised the remnants of the Ditch Mitch! crowd hasn’t screamed to the top of their collective lung about this piece from the Richmond Palladium-Item, it goes without saying “you win some, you lose some”. Those are the breaks.
“A company that could have brought more than 300 jobs to Richmond has decided to locate elsewhere. Officials of the Economic Development Corp. of Wayne County learned Wednesday that the unidentified company will move to Ames, Iowa.”
It bears mentioning that Iowa is a “Right to Work” state. Indiana, though a bill to make Indiana “Right to Work” is always introduced and never passes the General Assembly thanks to Democrats beholden to the organized labor syndicates, is not.
Business and commerce groups many times claim more business would move here if Indiana would stand up to Big Labor and pass a right to work law. It will only get worse as businesses could leave the state for other Right to Work states if Congress and the new POTUS pass their “card check” law. This will allow unions to forcibly sign employees to unions, presumably under duress. Nothing like concrete filled boots to make your point.
I’m not thinking that’s a company worried about union employees or is too worried about “right to work”. Just throwing that out there. Especially since I know a lot of homeschoolers and am at the very least partially familiar with their curriculum.
I’ve been working on an economic development project lately, comparing Illinois and Indiana and trying to look at why companies choose Illinois. The biggest issue is our personal property tax, which Illinois does not have. In one case a technology company with $40 million in new technology alone saw moving to Indiana as costing $8 million more than moving to Chicago! (over 20 years)
Probably time to look at eliminating the personal property tax in Indiana. It’s under-reported, most small businesses don’t even pay it, it’s targeted unfairly at computers while letting steel mills pay “special” rates … I’d say an unfair tax all around.
I know we’re still reeling from getting rid of the inventory tax, but I’d like to see the legislature step up and layout a 10 year plan to eliminate the personal property tax.
You’re going to have to help me out here a bit. Clearly Illinois DOES have property taxes as they have a web site dedicated to it:
http://www.revenue.state.il.us/LocalGovernment/PropertyTax/index.htm
So there must be a bit more to the story than Illinois doesn’t have any. In the reading I did when we were going through these battles, there is not ONE state in the union that does not use property taxes to one degree or another.
That isn’t an argument against getting rid of property tax. Just an argument that governments have had a difficult time doing so.
More info on Illinois: They do not have a “state” property tax, only local real property tax. Actually Indiana does the same thing: the only state item is the State Fair grounds, which is something like a 0.01% tax rate.
But it does look like they have comparable real property taxes to ours. See http://www.stlrcga.org/x489.xml
But corporations have a “replacement” tax, which is something like a 2.5% income tax that goes to localities as a replacement for personal property taxes that were eliminated years ago. That doesn’t seem particularly competitive to me. But then again, I don’t know anything about the general Corporate tax rates.
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