Friends and community,
For my entire lifetime, I’ve heard this refrain from politicians: to create prosperity and jobs, attract business and to grow an economy, we must gut our government, repeal hard-fought worker protections, and cut corporate taxes and taxes on the ultra-rich who sit in the corporate boardrooms.
And OF COURSE that’s what the politicians say!
Large corporations have line items in their budgets to ‘lobby’ and legally bribe our politicians to say these things. The ultra-rich and the corporations they run have set up whole networks of ‘think tanks’ to promote policies that enrich themselves at the public’s expense. They promote policies like gutting our governments, repealing hard-fought worker protections and prevailing wage laws, pillaging West Virginia’s public schools, and cutting taxes on the ultra-rich.
In West Virginia, this rhetoric has been put on steroids in a race to the bottom, under the argument that businesses don’t come to West Virginia because our tax and regulatory structures are too burdensome compared to neighboring states.
But the truth is, WE CAN’T CUT our way to prosperity.
Even if we accept the idea that government should be run like a business, it’s an old mantra in business (and especially in start-ups) that you have to spend money to make money.
The truth is that businesses generally want to do business where they don’t have to pay for the entire cost of doing business. That means they want to do business in places with good roads, good water and sewage infrastructure, and where the schools are robust and young workforces are well educated.
And that’s a win-win!
Those are all things that communities want AND that attract businesses, which in turn fosters a growing economy.
Good roads, good infrastructure, and good educational opportunities for children are also all things that attract and retain young workers and families. These things attract tourists. These things help local farms. These things help lower the costs for people starting their own local businesses.
But none of these things are things that will build themselves or that the private sector will do out of charity, because the benefits from public infrastructure are shared among community, and corporations can’t exclude the public (you and me and our families and neighbors) from sharing in the benefits of public infrastructure.
This is not radical thinking in terms of America’s or West Virginia’s history – these are the things we did as a nation in the aftermath of World War II, and these are the things that made the U.S. an industrial powerhouse and built the most remarkable middle-class the world has ever seen.
It wasn’t until politicians reached a bipartisan consensus to gut American institutions and to sell off our public sector to unscrupulous profiteers that American industrial and manufacturing dominance waivered.
And now, politicians in West Virginia insist that West Virginia must follow the same path, but more aggressively. Shrink our West Virginian government and allow out-of-state corporations run by big political donors to fill in the gaps; repeal worker protections and wage laws that West Virginian workers literally fought and died for; and of course, cut taxes on the out-of-state corporations and allow them to take as much money out of our economy as they can extract from our labor and resources, as fast as possible.
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This campaign says that it’s time to say ENOUGH! It’s again time to invest in our communities and our public infrastructure. That it’s again time to say that our government can be what we want it to be and it can do what we want it to do. And that it’s time to break the regional monopolies that form when we beg individual corporations to do business in our state and force citizen taxpayers pay for their profits.
It will take all of us, and it will take honest engagement with the issues, without buzzword smokescreens and knee-jerk posturing.
Simply put, healthy communities with good infrastructure are attractive to businesses that support the community, and that’s why it’s time to invest in our communities!
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Thank you,
Troy N. Miller
Candidate for West Virginia House of Delegates, District 98
Learn more about the campaign and it’s foundations in the “21st c. Economic Bill of Rights” in this article from the The Journal in Martinsburg, WV
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