Mark Twain: It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “Any company that makes a decision as to where they are going to be, based on the tax rate, is a company that won’t be around very long….If you’re down to that incremental margin you don’t have a business.”

Peter O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa, Secretary of the Treasury in the Bush administration: “If you want to give me inducements for something I am going to do anyway, I will take it. But good businesspeople do not do things because of inducements, they do it because they can see that they are going to be able to earn the cost of capital out of their own intelligence and organization of resources.”

Dennis Cuneo, Senior Vice President, Toyota (in charge of site selection in North America): “If you pull too many incentives out of the community in the beginning, you pay the price down the road. It’s a pennywise but dollar-foolish thing to do.We believe it is in our best business interest to be a good corporate citizen and contribute to the community right away.” (San Antonio Express News, 2/6/2003, “San Antonio Offered Firm Lowest Incentives”) (Toyota passed up incentives reportedly up to $370 million more than San Antonio offered, and actually donated back most of the incentives it received)

Tony Mitchell, spokesman for American Express: “Our decision to return downtown…was not predicated on financial incentives.”  (Newsday, 6/3/2002)

Luis Marin, CEO, Citgo (received $35 million in subsidies to move 700 headquarters jobs from Tulsa to Houston): “This decision was not based on (subsidy) economics.” (Associated Press, 4/26/2004)

Robert Gavin (Wall Street Journal, 2/14/2001): “As States cut corporate taxes, incentives lose their advantage.”  It’s “a classic race to the bottom, in which states compete with tit-for-tat responses until nearly all impose the same low level of tax liability. At that point, the economic advantage of lowering corporate taxes vanishes, leaving as the ultimate winner the companies that pocketed millions in tax breaks.”

Peter Fisher, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, The University of Iowa: If a new manufacturing or distribution facility under normal conditions does not generally produce a large enough fiscal surplus to offset the fiscal losses produced by the residential development that follows that expansion, or produces only a slight net surplus, how could we expect subsidized business expansion to pay for itself?

“I find that those incentives play a relatively minor role” in corporate expansion decisions, says Jon Udell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison business professor

Bill McCoshen, who ran the Wisconsin Commerce Department from December 1994 to September 1998, agrees that “incentives typically don’t make any difference one way or another.”

Donald Dunshee, CEO of Broomfield Economic Development Corporation: “If they’re looking here, they want to be here.”

Hal Edmondson, vice president and corporate manufacturing manager for H-P: “Companies don’t come here for incentives; they come here because it’s a good place to do business. What really matters is how good a place it is to live and how good is the support structure.”  (Gazette, April 29 1988)
 
Dick Sellers, U.S. customer support center manager, Digital Equipment Company:   ”You have a responsibility to maintain the environment that we moved here for,…”  (one of the state’s top priorities should be) “responsible planning - so that we don’t ruin this beautiful place where we all live.” during a meeting with Lt. Gov Mike Callihan, 
 
He said quality of life issues - including clean air, urban sprawl, traffic and crime rates - have a big effect on DEC’s ability to recruit and retain employees. “We believe that the better quality of life a community has, the easier it is for us to attract a quality person,” he said.

“When we look to expand, we need a place we can bring people to,” Seller said, pointing out the window of the conference room to a green, tree-covered hillside. “And if that ridge there is covered with industry, they won’t come.”  (Gazette, 7/21/1988)

Lt. Governor Mike Callihan (in 1988):  ”We could see ourselves duplicating Silicon Valley, and that’s not what we want to do,” he said. Callihan said Denver’s air quality and other environmental aspects already have declined too far.    ”Here (Colorado Springs) it really hasn’t slipped too far away,” although the city’s air quality is declining and its “tan cloud” could eventually rival Denver’s famous “brown cloud,” he said.

Former Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus once refused demands by Hewlett-Packard for tax concessions in order for HP to locate a manufacturing plant in Idaho. In a frank discussion with David Packard, Andrus told Packard that there would be no concessions. Andrus informed Packard that when a company (or an individual) came to Idaho, it became a citizen of that state and played by the same rules as everyone else. Although not happy, Packard agreed that Andrus’s argument made sense and opened a plant in Idaho. To some degree, the Aristotelian concept of virtue was alive and well in Idaho.