This is the Katoro Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 1st,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown. It's a game that mayors and governors know well.

Trying not to give away the store while attracting new business development

in your city or state.

Inevitably, the big corporate entities trying to make those location decisions

do their best to squeeze as hard as they can.

Mark Joffi is co-author of a new Cato paper offering a way out of the game of getting squeezed

for subsidies.

One of my old professors did a lot of economic development work

and a story that he told sort of stuck with me when various cities would compete for some project, some event,

event, or some installation.

Quite often, the people who would be making the decision, be it the NBA or some other, a large corporation,

would essentially get a hotel room or a hotel

suite and invite the mayors and in some cases the governors to come in and sit down and make their pitch and

then they would say thank you very much you may leave and then they'd bring in the

next set of politicians to make their pitch.

And this seems to me, to the extent that this may may happen this seems to me an enormously

self-defeating way certainly can't serve taxpayers particularly well as a method for attracting some kind of development or big ticket item into your community.

You know, your story resonates with something that I came across when we were researching

this policy analysis.

I did not know that there's an industry of site consultants, and these are folks

that work with companies and then work with states and cities to optimize the incentive packages that they get to move to a particular

...