We’re surprised it took this long:
The Allegheny Conference on Community Development, which never met a tax or a giveaway of public dollars that it didn’t like, is proposing the creation of a Downtown Investment Zone (DIZ) to “save” downtown Pittsburgh.
As the Post-Gazette reports it:
“As the crisis in Downtown deepens, with 26 office buildings in danger of foreclosure, the region’s top economic development agency is calling for the creation of a $200 million pot funded by new taxes or fees to help with residential conversions and other improvements. …
“Based on the presentation obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the rescue plan would be funded through [state] enabling legislation that would authorize the city to generate ‘new local revenue’ to help with the conversion of struggling office buildings to residential.”
Details are few and far between at this point. We can only wonder if that’s by design to limit scrutiny of the latest effort to tax Pittsburgh back to “prosperity” – if not an attempt to outright limit outrage among the tax-paying public.
Why should the public pay to bail out high-rise owners who did little or nothing to keep their office complexes contemporary?
They should not.
Why should the public subsidize office-to-residential conversions for which, in many cases, the marketplace has deemed not cost-effective?
They should not.
If these same high-rise owners say such conversions are cost-prohibitive and make no economic sense without taxpayer subsidies, what makes the Allegheny Conference brainiacs think they will want to pay higher taxes – on properties whose values have tanked because of high vacancy rates – through this DIZzyingly dubious proposal?
They will fight it tooth and nail, just as they fought to have their assessments lowered.
But we are left to wonder, depending how expansive the DIZ legislation is styled, if it will end up being just another in a long line of wealthfare programs– a wealth-transference scheme under the guise of a “Downtown Investment Zone.”
Again, the paucity of the details precludes any kind of in-depth analysis of what might be coming.
But the fact that the Allegheny Conference is drafting the proposed legislation is not encouraging. And past being Pittsburgh prologue, it has all the early indications of cluster cluck.
Speaking of dizzyingly dubious public policies, my longtime friend and economist Don Boudreaux has taken Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Bob Casey to task for his “economically nonsensical claim that today’s inflation is caused by greed,” supposedly the kind of “greed” exemplified by product “shrinkflation.”
That is, companies shrinking the size/volume of their products but charging the same price.
Casey, the Pennsylvania Democrat, continued to press his claim last week in an NPR interview.
But, Boudreaux, a heralded professor of economics at George Mason University, took NPR interviewer Ayesha Rascoe to task in a letter to her NPR editor:
“How refreshing it would be if at least once your reporters would ask people, such as Sen. Casey, who assert that corporations have unchecked power to raise prices or shrink package sizes, this question:
“’If what you say is true, why don’t you start a company that charges more reasonable prices or offers larger portions?
“’You’d make a fortune by attracting away from the price-gougers all the consumers who you assert are now suffering terribly. Rather than siccing the government on the alleged price-gougers, if you instead went into competition with them, you enrich yourself and consumers!
“’Can you explain to me why you don’t put your money where your mouth is?’”
Or as Boudreaux states the bottom line:
“None of these people are willing to put their money where their mouths are but they’re more than happy to put other people’s money where their mouths are.”
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
