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Published on Wednesday, July 20, 2011 by In These Times
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/11735/public_unions_urgently_need_to_re-frame_business_climate_game/
by Roger Bybee
For the past four decades, America's 50 states have allowed themselves to be trapped as players in a multi-state race to the bottom staged by Corporate America.
The inter-state (and increasingly global) competition to offer corporations the most perfect “business climate” costs states a huge share of their tax revenues. Greg LeRoy, author of the Great American Jobs Scam, estimates the cost of state-level inducements at a staggering $50 billion annually, and journalist David Cay Johnston pegs the figure at about $70 billion.
The “business climate” game—with corporate taxes slashed ever lower, accompanied by reductions in taxes for the investor class—inevitably shifts the tax burden to homeowners and small businesses lacking the size and resources to claim subsidies.
Now the backlash against the corporate tax cuts has arrived—and it is being channeled not against the “free market”-preaching CEOs whose firms have actually benefited richly, but against public employees whose pay is actually lower than similarly-educated private-sector counterparts.
In states like New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Illinois, Democratic governors have rhetorically accepted the right of public workers to be organized and to bargain collectively.
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