Quote:
Originally Posted by cardeza
The KOZ is a state program, hence the name. And it was designed to spur development in less than desirable vacant or industrial sites. Your "options" don't really make sense. Granting tax breaks to something that does not exist yet is nothing like cutting EXISTING revenue across the board. It's not an either or. The KOZ is like the abatement, a carrot to encourage something to be built that supposedly otherwise would not be built. If taxes weren't actually connected to real money everyone (even liberals) would love to cut taxes. We were talking about street paving and there has been lots of gnashing of teeth about lack of street sweeping, both were reduced under Nutter when he was cutting the budget during and after the recession. Tax money pays for stuff. If we don't want stuff paid for, then by all means lets start slashing those taxes.
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I've told you before. I'd be happy to cut the $125MM Kenney has added to the Police budget in the past 5 years that has got us a murder rate twice when he started. With a police force full of people who sit behind desks and in cars and don't even know how to walk a beat and meet their constituents, or potentially don't even care about them.
See there. These aren't hypothetical cuts I'm talking about in theory. Real things. Like you don't know how to spend money you don't get it.
Not that difficult.
Also. KOZs take a lot of companies and reshuffle them within the city. (Glaxo Smith Kline, Dechert, FMC). So don't give me that BS.
They wouldn't be motivated to move a few blocks in the first place if we had sensible tax policy. That could even mean incrementally increasing some taxes while reducing others that don't make sense.
I've said it a million times. I'd be okay if incremental increases in property taxes were used to decrease wage or business taxes. (In the past), property taxes were artificially low and high business taxes had an outsized effect on job growth. Increase one, decrease another, with net net overall positive effect on growth and tax revenue.
But you can talk about your hypothetical tropes. I'm talking real solutions.