More on corporate welfare

According to the Huntsville Times:

Verizon Wireless plans to build a $44 million, 152,000-square-foot Alabama headquarters and customer service center in Thornton Research Park in Huntsville.

The center is scheduled to be completed late next year and is expected to have about 1,300 employees by the end of 2008. ...

The City of Huntsville, Madison County, the State of Alabama and the Tennessee Valley Authority pitched in $1.25 million in cash, said Neal Wade, director of the Alabama Development Office. Of that amount, $850,000 is coming from the state, he said.

An estimated $1 million in training through the Alabama Industrial Development Training is also part of the incentives package.

Also, the company could receive up to $15 million in tax breaks over 20 years. State law provides for a capital credit to be applied to the income-tax liability generated by income from an approved project, and the capital credit is available each year, for 20 years. It is calculated at 5 percent of the total capital costs of the project.

Verizon Wireless looked at "a lot of different communities" for the center, Riley said, but what sold the company on Huntsville was "your quality of life. ... It's not incentives."

Well, if it wasn't the giveaways that attracted Verizon to Huntsville, then why give them away to begin with?

Let me be clear. I know that liberals have developed the annoying habit of calling tax cuts "giveaways," regardless of how they are structured, but I'm no liberal, and by "giveaways," I don't mean business-friendly tax policies and tax cuts that are broadly applicable to all. I do mean special tax credits that are available only for those activities designated by government as "approved projects." And I do mean cash incentives paid directly out of tax revenues to businesses to cover the costs of construction, employee training, and general business operations. Those types of interventionist government policies define corporate welfare.

Allowing companies to keep more of their own earnings by lowering the burdens of taxation and regulation is a worthy objective. Filling corporate bank accounts with the earnings of taxpaying citizens is obscene.