We Built It. The Romney campaign and
the wider conservative movement believe they have a winner in a slogan designed
to refute President Obama’s comment about the role of government assistance to
business in favor of an idealized Ayn Rand-style entrepreneurship that needs no
stinkin’ public infrastructure.
They are so confident, in fact, that
they asked a strangely inapt group of messengers to promote the theme at the
Republican Convention: a slew of governors. Since Ronald Reagan, the right has
ignored the incongruity of having public officials play a leading role in
denouncing the public sector. Yet the GOP governors who took to the stage in
Tampa to celebrate up-by-one’s-bootstraps free enterprise raised this hypocrisy
to new heights.
Despite their frequently expressed laissez-faire beliefs, they have each presided over deals in which huge sums of taxpayer money have been handed over to large corporations in the name of economic development. The Romney campaign, which has been making deceitful allegations about Obama Administration changes in welfare work requirements, chose to have its big convention theme delivered by some of the biggest proponents of corporate welfare.
She failed to
mention that Boeing’s decision to locate its second Dreamliner assembly line in
Charleston was more than a little influenced by a state and local subsidy
package estimated to be worth more than $900 million.
That deal was originally negotiated
by her predecessor Mark Sanford but Haley enthusiastically carried it out and
went to great lengths to defend Boeing against Machinists union charges that
the move to South Carolina was prompted by anti-union animus. Haley has also
made subsidy deals of her own, including the $9 million recently given to Michelin for a tire plant
(photo). Haley subsequently told a tire industry conference: “We want to help you do
more business in South Carolina and we want to make sure that you grow. That’s
our job.”
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell—who told the
convention “Big government didn’t build America: You built America!—agreed to
give up to $14 million in subsidies to Northrop Grumman to
relocate its headquarters to northern Virginia. The move was motivated by a
need to be near the company’s dominant customer, the Pentagon, so the subsidies
were probably unnecessary and could be seen as a reward for the large contributions the company made to his election
campaign.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another
member of the we-built-it chorus, has given in to job blackmail demands by
companies threatening to move their operations out of state unless they got big
subsidy deals. Kasich’s administration negotiated $100
million packages with both Diebold Inc. and American Greetings Corp.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a
rightwing hero for his campaign against public worker collective bargaining
rights, used his convention speech to emphasis the importance of letting
people “control their own destiny in the private sector.” In July, Walker announced that the state had awarded $62 million
in tax credits to Kohl’s to get the retailer to expand its headquarters in the
Milwaukee suburb of Menomonee Falls.
And then there’s conservative
bad-boy idol Chris Christie, who gave the keynote address at the convention.
The New Jersey governor’s administration has been handing out lavish tax credit deals to companies moving from
one location in the state to another, including $250 million to Prudential
Insurance, $100 million to Panasonic and $81 million to Goya Foods. Since
taking office in 2010, Christie has given away more than $1.5 billion in subsidies to
corporations.
The examples above focus on bigger
deals involving larger companies, since those are the ones with the biggest
giveaways of taxpayer funds. Yet many state subsidy programs also serve smaller
firms. My colleagues and I at Good Jobs First have assembled data on more than
200,000 subsidy awards from state and local governments around the country in
our Subsidy Tracker
database. Most of the recipients are not in the Fortune 500.
I cannot resist mentioning that one
of those small recipients is First State Manufacturing, a business run by Sher
Valenzuela, who is running for Lt. Governor in Delaware on a tea party platform
and who was given time at the Republican convention to tell her “I built it”
story.
In addition to the federal contracts and Small Business Administration
loans revealed by Media Matters, information gathered
for Subsidy Tracker shows that First State has received more than
$29,000 in reimbursements for training costs through Delaware’s Blue Collar
Training Grant program—a modest amount but another indication of business
dependence on government.
Claims about the autonomy of the
private sector are one of the Big Lies of modern conservatism. The real
objective of the Right is along the lines of what Gov. Haley told that tire
industry conference: to make sure government serves business through subsidies,
deregulation, tax minimization and weakening of unions.
To the companies receiving these
forms of assistance to expand their business, one could easily adopt the
language of President Obama and say “you didn’t build that alone.” The truth is
that both liberals and conservatives believe that government should aid the
private sector.
The difference between the two is in what is expected in
return. Liberals make an effort (albeit inadequate) to impose some
accountability, whereas the Right believes that business should be able to take
all it wants with no strings attached. The debate over whether to limit
government should really be one on whether there will be limits on corporate
power.