Business & Job Creation
Businesses need a friendly and fair business environment so they can compete, innovate, and create jobs. We’re keeping politicians from playing favorites by offering special deals and tax breaks to the favored few.
A lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Goldwater Institute may be the beginning of the end of the counterproductive and increasingly idiotic practice of municipal tax incentives.
The Legislature has been trying to rein in the practice. But it shouldn't be up to the Legislature. The Arizona Constitution plainly prohibits such subsidies.
The Goldwater Institute filed suit Wednesday challenging Phoenix's controversial subsidy of almost $100 million to CityNorth, a luxury development under construction in northeast Phoenix.
The lawsuit, filed in Maricopa County Superior Court on behalf of six plaintiffs, seeks to block the subsidy and similar handouts in the future. It names members of the Phoenix City Council and City Manager Frank Fairbanks.
A fiscally conservative watchdog group has filed a lawsuit to stop a city of Phoenix sales tax subsidy for a proposed retail and mixed-use development in the far northeast part of the city.
The Goldwater Institute has filed suit in Maricopa County Superior Court asking for an injunction against a $100 million Phoenix subsidy for the CityNorth project.
The CityNorth development is a large retail and mixed-use project being built near the Desert Ridge shopping complex off of the Loop 101 Freeway near the Phoenix-Scottsdale border.
A new study blasts Arizona's reliance on Ireland's model for growth and using state money and incentives to lure private biotechnology companies.
The Goldwater Institute report contends tax cuts and reduced government spending and regulation were responsible for Ireland's recent economic growth rather than public subsidies and tax breaks aimed at biotech.
The United States economy is creating millions of new jobs, yet the average American worker is feeling the squeeze of stagnant wages and the offshoring of entire industries.
The cure? Brainpower. Innovation, more specifically.
That's the watchword for a 17-member team of national leaders in government, academia and private industry that gathered Tuesday in Phoenix as part of a meeting of the National Governors Association. The project, known as Innovation America, is to dream up new ways to turn American ingenuity into new jobs.
Prop. 202, the minimum wage initiative, would raise the statewide minimum wage from $5.15 to $6.75 per hour.
Proponents don't talk much about the other provisions in the proposition, which is understandable. There's some pretty nasty stuff in the fine print. The legal minimum wage, in principle, is government interference with our individual rights to contract with each other. If I need a job and you want some work done, we should be able to voluntarily enter into an employment contract with mutually agreed upon terms.
A proposed state law establishing a $6.75 minimum wage likely will go to voters in November, making Arizona one of several states with similar ballot issues this year.
Arizona does not have a minimum wage law, but most employers are required to abide by federal minimum wage law. The federal minimum wage, now at $5.15 an hour, hasn't been increased since 1997. Adjusted for inflation, that is about $6.25 in today's dollar.
Since Congress has declined to raise the federal minimum wage, a broad effort to take on the issue at the state level has spread across the nation.
Chandler has given Intel its blessing to borrow $350 million in tax-exempt Industrial Development Authority bonds for its $2 billion local expansion.
It's the largest such loan in city history and demonstrates Chandler's unique relationship with the computer chipmaker, the city's biggest employer.
Until now, the highest amount approved in Chandler was $28 million in 1982 for the then-Chandler Community Hospital.
Arizona should fix its unemployment system to stop multimillion-dollar waste due to fraud and other flaws, a Goldwater Institute report suggests.
The report, commissioned by the conservative think tank, will be released in late January. Oregon-based economist William B. Conerly, in an early overview Tuesday morning in Phoenix, said:
There is a popular recipe one can use when the facts don't support your conclusion. Take fear of change, add a peck of misinformation, stir in a dash of hypothetical scenarios and voil! The result, of course, is the same tired, indigestible propaganda.
This is the tactic Tom Jenney used in his May 2 guest column to attack Pima County's Inclusive Home Design Ordinance. As it turns out, however, the reality is that this ordinance is a vital ingredient to addressing the needs of our community.