Know Your Audience: Justice Orr Edition

I was at a meeting of the Triangle Chapter NAIOP, a group of local developers and others involved in the commercial real estate industry, on Thursday and witnessed an event that should gives any of us that talk in public pause to ensure that we know who we are talking to.

Former Justice Bob Orr was scheduled to speak at the event. The speach showed great courage on the part of Orr who was speaking on the evils of economic incentives to a very business friendly group. Orr ignored the death stares to give numerous coherent arguments against the use of incentives or "subsidies" as he called them to businesses to relocate to North Carolina or expand here; the main focus of his speach were the famous incentives given to large corporations like Dell, Lenovo, and Google recently which were tied to the creation of jobs in the area. There are in fact some arguments against the use of incentives, but the one thing Justice Orr came back to, as might be expected from a Republican speaking to crowd of business Republicans, was that "no one in this crowd receives incentives" (essentially the if it does not directly benefit you, why bother argument). The problem with this argument became apparent when at the close of the meeting the president of the chapter asked who in the crowd had received subsidies as part of a deal; over half of the crowd raised their hands. Then the president asked how many received incentives more than once, and about a quarter of the group had. Then the president turned to the representatives of Progress Energy and stated that "I could ask this all day and Progress would keep their hands up."

The point of all of this is that economic incentives are so engrained into our system that many local small and larger (i.e. Progress) businesses receive incentives in all sorts of their deals; usually governments want to encourage some sort of behavior, such as higher development density or public parks. Any discussion on the subject needs to factor these smaller incentives in and not focus exclusively on the large grants to big corporations. Also, arguing against incentives to a crowd comprised of beneficiaries of incentives might be a tough sell.