Giving money to Peabody is not economic development

There is a great post on the Daily Yonder blog by Judy Owens from the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED) about the history of economic development incentives in Kentucky.  Looking at the historical context of these incentives, it becomes abundantly clear that giving $315 million dollars to energy giant Peabody Energy is a bad deal no matter how you cut it:

There are lots of reasons not to like the deal that Peabody Energy Co. is cooking up to build a coal-to-liquid fuel plant in Kentucky. The incentives Peabody wants are unprecedented: $315 million in subsidies that will be on the backs of Kentucky taxpayers for the next 25 years. Worse, it’s an unproven technology that will create bigger environmental problems under the guise of solving the country’s energy dependence. The U.S. Senate considered similar legislation last month, and it failed. Miserably. The uber-conservative editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, who are as pro-business as it gets, thought government funding of coal conversion was a waste of public money.

But even if Peabody Energy Co. were not a coal company, and made tennis shoes, cell phones or computers, this deal would be a bad one.

Like so many other big deal incentives have been in Kentucky, coal-to-liquid fuel will be a bad deal for the state’s taxpayers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, local school districts and communities in general. Why is that? It’s simple. Over the years, the incentives keep getting bigger and bigger, the toll on taxpayers worse and worse while the corporate demands grow more outrageous.

Read the full post here "Speak Your Piece: Tax Lure for a Liquid Coal Plant Will Put Kentucky on the Hook"

And, if you want to learn more about the problems with economic development policy in Kentucky and how we can fix it, visit our High Road to Economic Development pages.