ITEP provides an 80% tax abatement for up to 10 years. This is supposed to be in exchange for job creation and economic investment in Louisiana. Except Landry removed the requirement for job creation back in Feb.

As Landry explains, “It is not about job creation. It is about capital investment.”

To sweeten corporate welfare as an incentive to business, Landry is now giving businesses with existing ITEP contracts the ability to “opt-out” of previous requirements binding them in their current contracts.

So come to Louisiana, exploit whatever you need, benefit from corporate welfare and now you don’t even have to create jobs to do it.

The Louisiana Comeback campaign created by GNO Inc. and the Pelican Institute, has been pushing this idea that Louisiana must be freed from over dependency on Federal aid for several years.

They want to incentivise big businesses to come to Louisiana by allowing them to take advantage of ITEP, and claim this will allow Louisiana to be less dependent on Federal aid. However, if there are no jobs being created, and no state taxes going towards state level benefits how would that possibly benefit any Louisiana resident and actually make them less dependent?

It doesn’t offer any incentive to Louisiana residents to make them less dependent, it just makes wealthy individuals more wealthy.

Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but will keep mentioning it every time I come across more of this corrupt BS screwing over the state and telling us we should be happy about it:

The Pelican Institute is part of a nationwide network of think tanks (SPN). SPN is a Heritage Foundation affiliate and receives funding from some very wealthy individuals.

SPN is known for using these think tanks to push for state level policy that benefits their wealthy donors, and disguising the policy as representative of residents living in the state.

As in, these giant corporations are coming to Louisiana, not paying taxes, and not creating jobs because, we the people somehow believe it’s in our best interest.