And on a final note, it should be noted that even if Michigan vastly improves its business climate, we will still be competing with other states. And if other states offer incentives to industries that we want to come here, then we will have to offer incentives to those industries  in order to compete for them. As you noted in your article on LG's new plant, LG's Chem division is well run and makes over $11 billion in revenue on an annual basis, meaning that they can afford to pay $300 million for a plant. But the thing is, the reason they make a ton of money is that they keep their costs down by doing things like going to places where they get tax incentives when they build a plant. Michigan is competing with every other state in this country and the rest of the world too to attract industries. And many industries that would be interested in expanding to Michigan will get tax incentives in other states and countries, meaning that if Michigan is going to compete with them, then we need to offer at least a limited incentive if we're going to get them. And the industries that actually mesh well with the state's resources such as green energy companies are not going to come here without some type of tax incentive. And I'm hesitant to simply throw away that opportunity because we need industries to come here and use Michigan's abandoned factories because we have people here that can work there and we need these facilities to provide tax revenue to the state government again.

Parent