Cooper’s Baffling Hypocrisy on Corporate Welfare | Eastern North Carolina Now

Publisher's Note: This post appears here courtesy of the John Locke Foundation. The author of this post is Jon Sanders.

    The prospect of tax relief to North Carolina's small businesses is supposedly offensive to Gov. Roy Cooper. His June 15 press release complained that "the Republican Senate bill giving big tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy is bad policy."

    As best I can tell, the issue isn't that Cooper objects to massive giveaways to big corporations and the wealthy. After all, so far this year, Cooper has pledged $930.7 million to just 22 corporations. I am not making that up.

    Here's who he wants to keep taxing to fund those Favored Few:

• [A]ll companies in North Carolina. Who are they? Well, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration, 99.6% of them — over 930,000 different employers — are small businesses.
• Most of them have fewer than 100 employees. They're your local hardware stores, your roadside diners, your parts and service places, your lawn & garden people, your local boutiques, your Mom & Pops. They are — and they employ — what Cooper's spokesman referred to as "our hard-working families and communities." They are "the rich" when Cooper et al. want to denounce "tax cuts on the rich."