Texans for Public Justice published an article Austin’s Not-So-Smart Growth Subsidies back in October which reads:
The City of Austin is doling out $117 million in publicly financed incentives to attract a select few businesses to the mushrooming metropolis. An analysis of the city’s seven existing incentive deals reveals that the companies that receive these handouts account for a tiny fraction of the businesses that flock here, expand here or are born here. The costs of these deals typically outweigh the city’s optimistic estimates of their long-term benefits.
…
Yet the city counts torrid growth among its most urgent challenges and it even earmarked $5.4 million of its 2008 budget for managing this growth. For the foreseeable future, businesses will continue to invest in Austin en masse without a publicly subsidized handout. While depressed areas can make an argument for such incentives, does publicly subsidized growth constitute smart growth in the Live Music Capital of the World?
Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What are they doing?
First they hand out subsidies to major corporations, then they raise property taxes through the roof, then they wipe out half the equity of existing homeowners with the so-called McMansion ordinance and then…for the poor people driven out of their own homes by this kind of “progress” they try to make street vending and even panhandling illegal!
Talk about Yuppie Values. Sheesh!
