The City of Saint Louis is removing the pretzel vendors along Jamieson Avenue in south St. Louis due to complaints of traffic congestion. John Payne blogged about this yesterday, and cited this as an example of the government shutting down a successful entrepreneur.

I have a different perspective on the story. Although the city is cracking down on selling pretzels at that particular intersection, it is not banning the sale of pretzels in any other location. According to a recent story by Fox 2 on the subject, the city will take a laissez faire approach in the future:

“We’re not out looking for them, we didn’t put it on our hot list, I don’t have an inspector driving by every day. Our inspectors have plenty to do,” [Streets Director Todd Waelterman] explains. “You know if someone comes out here starts selling again and we receive a complaint, we’ll be back. If we don’t receive a complaint, we’re not planning on coming back.”

In this situation, the policy of looking the other way has many positive consequences. South City doesn’t become a generic, pretzel-less area; it can retain a feature that’s specific to Saint Louis. It secures a job for the vendors, and also generates business for a locally owned firm. Additionally, consumers win because they can get a pretzel fix without driving too far out of their way. Furthermore, instead of cracking down on pretzel vendors, the city can concentrate on bigger issues, like reducing crime and fixing the streets.

I applaud the city for taking a hands-off approach, and I hope that this is predictive of a larger trend of encouraging entrepreneurial activity in Missouri.

Today’s Post-Dispatch has a big story on pool safety and regulation in the St. Louis area. I’ll stipulate right off the bat that I think public health is a perfectly legitimate function of government, and has been so for a long time (controlling communicable diseases, especially). However, as with so many other things, there are countless examples in which the government has expanded that role to increase its part in our daily lives. And those rules may make us safer by bits and pieces, but they also make us less free in the same manner. I think most people have, and will continue, to accept that trade-off. I think that is unfortunate. But back to the pools.

I can’t imagine most people would have any objection — I certainly don’t — to the government monitoring the water quality and safety rules of truly public pools. But the government also defines “public” to include apartment buildings, private clubs, and more. In St. Louis County:

As of Wednesday, 248 pools had not been approved to open for summer, although many were awaiting final inspections this week. The county expects that some of those pools will remain closed, particularly at apartment complexes.

Assuming that most of these apartment complexes with pools are somewhat large complexes, we can reasonably say that thousands of people in St. Louis will now be denied the use of a pool this summer — and millions of dollars will be spent across the country on pool improvements — because of drain issues that have killed an average of one person per year across the entire nation. I am certain I sound like a jerk, but this immediately brings a classic Onion article to mind.

The Post-Dispatch article points out that Jefferson County does not have any pool inspectors. I think this is supposed to be a criticism of good ol’ JeffCo, but something important is lacking from the article — any evidence at all that there are problems with the pools in Jefferson County! Instead, believe it or not, the people of the county seem to be doing a perfectly good job of maintaining their own pools even without the threat of inspections to close them down.

Without a county, state or federal ordinance on sanitation, public pool owners in Jefferson County can make their own rules.

“We don’t care if we get checked or not. We keep a clean pool,” said Beverly Sweet, the superintendent of the Crystal City public pool. She said the water is tested several times a day and that chlorine tablets are automatically fed into the pool, which opens Saturday.

I’ll end with quoting the famous playwright David Mamet about how people (the vast majority, at least) tend do the right thing and work things out even if the government is not there to compel them:

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

Enjoy the pool this summer. Have a great Memorial Day weekend.

Within the health care debate that has taken place during the past year, “death panels” and health care rationing were both pegged by some as distinct possibilities and dismissed by others as ridiculous fantasies. Yesterday, Michael Tanner at the CATO Institute wrote that the concept of death panels may come to fruition, considering that the new director of Medicare and Medicaid is a fan of the United Kingdom’s National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), a government agency that has been accused of rationing health care.

Like all things, health care is a finite resource. As such, it is always rationed in some way. The important issue to determine is who — or what — is doing the rationing, and what criteria is used. After all, people ration in their daily lives when they choose how much of their paychecks to spend on groceries, clothes, or movie tickets. When individuals ration, they decide between individual trade-offs. The difference is not the mechanism, but the actor.

The price system is arguably the most efficient method to allocate resources. As Nobel laureate economist F.A. Hayek articulated in “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” the price system contains information for both the seller and buyer. With health care, however, true costs are largely veiled by what can be termed a “health care wedge” — a separation of consumers from knowledge of costs. A patient may face a decision of whether to seek treatment in the form of high-cost, high-intensity care or low-cost, low-intensity care (or no care, as the case may be) but lacks real price information to make an informed decision about whether the expected outcome will be worth the cost. This lack of information makes the high-cost, high-intensity care more appealing in situations where it might not otherwise be chosen. Because of the skewed incentive structure that this creates in the current health insurance market, costs will continue to rise. This leads some to believe that it is necessary for the government to establish new ways of rationing care, which ignores the real problem: the separation of consumer and cost of treatment. By finding a way to mitigate that health care wedge, the decisions about when and why to ration can be returned to individuals and their physicians.

How can this be done? Nearly two decades ago, Show-Me Institute scholar Susan Feigenbaum suggested a different mechanism for health insurance: indemnity insurance. She likened the process to automobile insurance. When an illness is diagnosed, the insurance company would follow a process that is similar to when an automobile claim is made. The company would assess the medical issue and write a check for the probable cost. The customer would then be able to choose how to spend that money.

This system would create an incentive to shop around. Less intensive — and less costly — treatments become would more appealing, because thriftiness is rewarded. Some people would choose to use the entire amount for intensive health care. Others, especially those with terminal illnesses, might opt for minimal hospice or palliative care and set aside the remainder in a trust fund for a child or grandchild. Depending on how this type of plan were implemented, certain caveats could be included, like specifying a minimum level of required care, or precluding autonomy in making medical choices for those deemed too sick to make a sound decision. Those issues aside, indemnity insurance would place the decision in the hands of the individual.

The important thing is that this mechanism would introduce competition into one of the more expensive areas of health care, end-of-life care. Competition is necessary to bring down health care costs in the long term. Indemnity care is not the only possible solution, but it is one that must be considered, alongside other market-based solutions like health savings accounts. Missourians would benefit with an opportunity to choose from a variety of market-based health care options.

If you have spent much time in the South City area of Saint Louis, you’ve probably seen street vendors selling Gus’ Pretzels at several area intersections. Well, that may not be the case for much longer:

The city is cracking down on the long tradition of pretzel vendors along Jamieson Avenue in south St. Louis. Because of complaints, city officials say, they must enforce an ordinance that prohibits the vendors.

Kunkel began selling pretzels in 1980 after retiring from the U.S. Postal Service. He first worked at Grand Avenue near Carondelet Park, but later moved to the Lindenwood Park neighborhood, where he had more success.

He became a fixture on Saturday mornings. Until a couple of years ago, he was the lone vendor in the median at Jamieson and Fyler avenues. He sold pretzels for 50 cents.

Then brothers John and Reuben Galvin set up shop five blocks south in Jamieson’s median at Pernod Avenue.
[...]
John Galvin insists he wasn’t trying to run Kunkel out of business. He was always careful to not sell at his spot. The median was just too good a place to pass up.

“You can hit people on both sides,” Galvin said, adding that the city has few similar medians remaining at stop signs.
[...]
Kunkel says his customers called the city complaining about the Galvins. They thought they were doing Kunkel a favor by targeting his competition.

But it turns out both parties had been operating outside the law. The city forbids street vending outside of downtown.

“You can’t get rid of them without getting rid of me,” Kunkel said.

Todd Waelterman, director of streets, said city inspectors don’t typically enforce the rule without complaints. During the past month, some residents said the vendors blocked their view of traffic, and the city had to act.

Although it is always unfortunate to see a successful entrepreneur shut down by the government, if there are legitimate safety concerns, this move could be for the best. After all, major thoroughfares like Jamieson are primarily for driving, not selling goods and services. However, if the the city could institute some minimal safety rules, there should be nothing to stop these successful businessmen from serving hungry drivers. If that proves impossible, there are other, less busy, intersections where I have encountered pretzel vendors plying their trade without impeding traffic or endangering anyone — some of the intersections around Tower Grove Park, for instance. Hopefully, the city can ensure public safety with a few simple rules and go back to leaving the pretzel vendors in benign neglect.

Government has no costs — only benefits — according to several professors in economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, which is well known for its heterodox (i.e., usually very anti-market) economics department, writing at The Huffington Post about deficit “myths.” I hesitate to actually use the label “economist” to describe any of these people, because they do not seem to accept the very basic economic concept of opportunity cost — at least not when it comes to government spending. (For what it’s worth, I hold no degree in economics, and do not claim to be an economist myself, but I at least like to think that I understand the basics of the subject.)

Opportunity cost is what a person or group gives up when they choose between two or more alternatives. This may be a strong limitation on the actions of mere mortals, but these UMKC professors imply that the government is capable of magic that can free us from the burden of trade-offs. There are enough fallacies and half-truths in the article that it would take a whole book to respond in full (a book that someone actually wrote more than 60 years ago), so I will confine myself to some of the more glaring ones.

Arguing that there is no fiscal crisis in Social Security and Medicare, UMKC Associate Professor Stephanie Kelton writes:

the government’s ability to pay benefits does not in any way depend on the balance in the Social Security or Medicare Trust Funds. Benefit checks come directly from the Treasury, and, as Alan Greenspan has admitted, “[A] government cannot become insolvent with respect to obligations in its own currency.”

There is definitely some truth here; Social Security and Medicare are both paid out of general revenues, which is going to be even more necessary now that Social Security is itself running a deficit. Kelton tries to claim that we face no “tough choices” with these programs, but if no cuts are made to Medicare or Social Security, we will have to cut spending on other government programs, raise taxes, increase the deficit, or (as Kelton alludes with the Greenspan quote) trigger substantial inflation. I admit that I don’t know exactly what Kelton means by a “tough choice,” but none of those options are politically popular, so they all seem pretty tough to me.

Next, Professor Randall Wray takes a shot at showing that current deficits won’t get passed on to the next generation because government debt is really just an accounting trick:

There are about 13 trillion dollars in Treasury securities at the Fed. Collectively, these savings accounts are known as the national debt. The national debt represents a portion of the combined savings of US residents, corporations, banks, and foreign governments. And most folks probably don’t know that when a person buys them, the Fed simply transfers the dollars from her checking account to a savings account at the Fed called a “Treasury security.”

Tens of billions of dollars of these Treasury securities come due every week. When that happens, the Fed pays off that “debt” simply by transferring the dollars, plus interest, out of these savings accounts and back to the holders’ checking accounts.

In the future, when our grandkids make payments on Treasury securities, they will simply credit accounts at the Fed-just as we do today, and as our grandparents did before us. It is a simple matter of data entry, and not a financial burden.

Again, this has some truth to it, but what Wray does not discuss is that running deficits of upwards of 10 percent of GDP will eventually cause the interest rate the government pays on those bonds to skyrocket. Take a look at the second graph in this article, which shows the Congressional Budget Office’s projection of costs for Medicare, Social Security, and interest on the debt. Unless we rein in deficits, by the early 2030s we will be paying 5 percent of our GDP just for the privilege of borrowing more, and the number only rises from there. Furthermore, government debt is not merely an accounting trick. Those dollars command real resources in the economy, and when the government spends those dollars, there are fewer resources for private use. If the debt continues to grow, we will have to devote more resources every year to paying off those loans, which again entails either higher taxes, decreased government spending on other items, inflation, or some combination thereof.

Although the first two examples are bad enough, I have saved the worst for last (there are plenty of other absurdities in the article, but this post is long enough as it is). After giving us the single most asinine sentence in the article (”Taxes, then, are what give value to money.”), doctoral candidate Yeva Nersisyan gives a full-throated defense to the government-as-magic view of the world:

Any and all financial constraints on government spending such as issuing government bonds dollar for dollar against deficit spending, debt ceilings, and restrictions on the Fed’s ability to buy treasury securities are purely political and necessarily self imposed, because they are imposed on us by our chosen institutional arrangements and not by something inherent in our economic system.

No doubt that in purely dollar terms the government can spend as much as it wants. It could print us all checks for a million-kajillion dollars if it so pleased, but it still operates within a world with real constraints. There are only so many resources available in the country at any given time, and it is impossible for the government to create more out of thin air. Any attempt by the government to raise more revenue through taxation or inflation will be met at the margin with more and greater attempts by individuals and businesses to avoid those taxes and hedge against rising prices. In short, government cannot mandate prosperity.

I’m sure it’s comforting to believe that there is some omnipotent organization that can solve all our problems for us, but that is a childish view of the world, and as adults we must put away childish things.

According to an editorial in the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., American Express chose that state’s Guilford County as the location for its new $600 million data center. This is a big deal for the following reason:

The financial services giant [...] never asked for millions of dollars in incentives that the Greensboro City Council and Guilford County Board of Commissioners were prepared to consider.

This is advantageous for taxpayers in North Carolina and in Guilford County. Not only will they experience job growth and productive economic activity, they don’t have to subsidize those jobs.

Furthermore, their tax money can be diverted to programs that have a higher priority, such as education or infrastructure, or returned to them to save or to spend in the private sector.

Additionally, because AmEx remains in the tax base, the state and local government in North Carolina can assess a tax rate that’s lower and more equal for all taxpayers. Unlike the new IBM service center in Columbia, Mo., AmEx will contribute property tax revenues, which will benefit public schools in the area.

The News & Record editorial also says:

[American Express] operates on an ethic of giving to the community, not taking from it, and now it has enhanced that reputation many times over.

I applaud the restraint that American Express has shown, and I hope that other corporations follow this example in their own expansion efforts. According to the editorial, a computer distribution center has also opened in the area without government incentives.

North Carolina is fortunate because profitable, confident businesses like American Express are moving to the state on their own volition, and without the financial assistance of the government. (If only Missouri were so lucky!)

Hat tip to John Payne.

Photo from the Kansas City Star.

Sing along:

Go ahead and hate your gasoline,

Go ahead and scam a friend.

Do it in the name of subsidies,

You can justify it with an E-10 blend.

There won’t be any markets working,

Come the judgment day,

On the inefficient morning after …

One free marketer rides away.

(continue singing)

And, I should add, rides away with 3 percent less gas mileage.

Thanks to Billy Jack Combest for the KC Star link.

Forbes recently published an article that praises Gov. Jay Nixon, and describes him as “cutter-in-chief”:

Nixon proposed to “right-size” government by merging agencies, eliminating state holidays, laying off more employees, getting rid of state vehicles, scaling back employee pension and health benefits, privatizing child support collections and curtailing Missouri’s expansive tax credit programs.

He may talk the talk, but he doesn’t consistently walk the walk — he has continued to support giving tax credits to specific businesses. Here, I reference the $28 million in state incentives that the Missouri government is giving to IBM to locate in Columbia, Mo., or the proposed $15 million in tax credits to support the Ford plant in Claycomo, Mo.

Even though the incentive package for Ford’s Claycomo plant didn’t pass the state legislature, the governor strongly supported the proposal. According to the Kansas City Star:

The bills’ failure was a disappointment to Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon, who had pushed hard for both the jobs bill and retirement reform, and worked through the day Thursday and Friday to make a deal on their passage.

“Unfortunately, the General Assembly missed a critical opportunity by failing to pass this package,” Nixon said.

The recession has provided a new opportunity to evaluate the appropriateness and the effectiveness of specific government programs. I do give credit to the governor for communicating his commitment to reduce state expenditures. However, I wish that he would advance a consistent message regarding tax credits.

By now, it’s old news that state and local governments awarded IBM a $31 million incentive package to persuade the company to build a service center in Columbia, Mo. What’s astounding, though, is the following headline in the Columbia Missourian:

IBM could bring $4.3 M to schools, slow budget cuts

In the article, reporter Molly Harbarger writes that at a press conference, Columbia’s mayor claimed that the new service center could bring in an additional $4.3 million in tax revenue for the Columbia Public School District during the next decade. District Superintendent Chris Belcher said that would amount to about $400,000 of extra income for the district per year.

Yet the school district, the city, and the state are forgoing large amounts of tax revenue to bring IBM to Columbia — that’s what this $31 million incentive package represents. To say that the school district will see its property tax revenues increase as a result of this project is, at the very least, to rely on uncertain and disputed methods to calculate the economic benefit of a new development.

As research analyst Christine Harbin wrote on Monday, the total $31 million price tag is actually an understatement of all the incentives awarded to IBM. Because the city owns the property where IBM will locate its service center (and will be leasing it to IBM for only $1 per year), the company will not have to pay property taxes on that property. In Harbin’s words, “this is a bigger subsidy than the $3 million the city paid for the building.” Furthermore, she noted, the $31 million does not include the sales tax exemption on personal property or the 50-percent property tax abatement on personal property awarded by Boone County.

So, at this point, there is no additional money going to the school district. After all, the city owns the building in which IBM will locate. Because the city will be leasing the property to IBM for the next 10 years, any improvements to the building will not bring additional tax revenue to the school district. In fact, it is a likely bet that some other company would have bought that building in the future, which means that the school district is not simply forgoing additional tax revenues, it is also missing out on the future property tax revenues that another, unsubsidized, company would have paid.

So, where exactly did the projected $431,000 in additional revenues for the district come from? The Missourian article doesn’t say. A quick search of Columbia’s website reveals a presentation from Regional Economic Development, Inc., about the purported benefits of the project, including the $431,000 figure — but no supporting research or background about how REDI came to that number is included.

In fact, as the Columbia Tribune reported, some government officials have suggested that the approval process for the IBM service center was less than transparent. Former city council member Karl Skala told Tribune reporter Jodi Jackson that “he was critical of Regional Economic Development Inc. for not providing more information to the Columbia City Council earlier in the economic recruitment process.”

I am skeptical of the claims made by Columbia’s mayor and district superintendent about the increase in property tax revenues. If nothing else, the school district cannot expect those benefits to accrue immediately. Had IBM itself paid for the building, the school district would have seen an immediate increase in its property tax revenues, to the tune of about $47,000.* Instead, the district appears to be banking on revenues that have yet to materialize — and probably won’t for a number of years, if at all.

In fact, most subsidized projects such as this fail to deliver on the promised economic activity. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a nonprofit think tank in Michigan, reported, after conducting an extensive survey and review of Michigan’s tax credits, that of 127 incentive packages awarded by the state, only 10 actually created the number of jobs initially promised within the expected time frame. That comes to less than 8 percent of projects that actually delivered the total number of jobs that had initially been pledged.

If projects supported by tax credits do such a poor job of delivering on job creation, we can likely expect similar errors to be made in the estimates of increased property tax revenue. There is a good chance that neither a total of 800 new jobs nor the additional tax revenue will come to fruition.

In short, the claimed future benefits of this project are promises, and nothing more.

* The $47,000 figure is based on the price that Columbia paid for the property. The purchase price of a property is not a perfect estimate of the appraised value of a piece of commercial property, but it is a good place to start.

A piece from the Kansas City Star this weekend highlighted current political disagreement over “Know Your Farmer,” a $65 million program run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture designed to educate people about the sources of their food, and something I’ve written about on the blog before. According to the Star, some politicians have taken issue with the program’s slant toward organic farmers over conventional farmers.

When the government promotes one business over another, it chooses economic winners and losers — something that government officials have no special skill for doing well. Some argue, though, that this governmental expenditure hardly rivals the ones for conventional farming:

Bruce Babcock, an economist and director of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development at Iowa State University, said it was “ironic” that [Sen. Pat] Roberts and others objected to the USDA spending $65 million on Know Your Farmer.

Babcock pointed out that commodity producers received $5 billion over the last two years, and the crop insurance industry received $7 billion.

Just because one group gets a subsidy does not mean that another group should get a subsidy as well. In fact, I would argue, consumers and taxpayers are better off if neither get subsidies.

Agriculture, like all businesses, is best left to the marketplace. Subsidies lower the cost of producing politically favored products; this distorts the market by shifting the supply curve. In the case of agriculture, subsidies have led to an overabundance in the production of certain commodities, like corn and soy, which drives down their prices relative to other products, making them less expensive to purchase and use as ingredients in other foods.

Agricultural subsidies have decreased the price of — and, thus, increased the demand for — products like high fructose corn syrup and corn feed for livestock. Some researchers have suggested that such subsidies have led to poor health outcomes and higher rates of obesity. Some disagree with this claim, although still and other researchers, including the American Medical Association, maintain that the subsidies have led to an increase in unhealthy foods in the United States. At any rate, more corn is being grown and subsequently incorporated into people’s diets than would otherwise happen. The subsidies have also lead to an increase in corn-based ethanol production, which costs taxpayers and may well result in marginal increases in environmental harm.

In real terms, subsidies don’t make food less expensive. Rather, they divert taxpayer funds from the market price of food to the production stages of farming. This influences farmers to grow more of the subsidized crops than people would otherwise demand, and so taxpayers end up paying more for their food than they would in an otherwise free market.

Some may argue that the promotional program discussed by the Star helps organic farmers to gain an advantage similar to that of conventional farmers. If people are interested in organic foods, though, they will purchase organic foods. Indeed, films like Food, Inc. and books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma have convinced many that they should vote with their wallets for organic foods. It’s unnecessary for the government to create an educational program to support organic farming.

Although $65 million is a small expenditure in comparison to the overall budget for agriculture, it still represents a substantial amount of taxpayer funds. Whether it be subsidies or educational programs, the government oversteps its role when it encourages one business over another, or one form of agriculture over another. If government officials truly want people to consume healthier food, the best strategy would be to level the playing field by eliminating subsidies and promotional programs, instead letting market forces work.

Sunday’s Post-Dispatch had an excellent story about the use of taxpayer-funded cars for public officials. In past decades, when government employees really did make a lot less than private-sector employees, a perk like the car might have made sense. Now, with the growth of public sector salaries, it is a practice that really should be abolished. I highly recommend that you read the Post story, but keep in mind that the people cited in it are not to blame for a practice that has been going on for a long time.

The real purpose of this blog post is to note that there is a private-sector solution to this issue. The Reason Foundation has done some great work on the subject of private companies managing government vehicle fleets. It might be the right time for state, county, and city governments in Missouri to give this idea serious consideration.

The Columbia Missourian recently published a summary of the $31 million incentive package that the state and local governments are providing to IBM to persuade it to locate a service center in Columbia, Mo. It includes more than $28 million in state tax credits.

From the article:

State incentives:

• $8.6 million through the Missouri BUILD Program
• $14.7 million through the Missouri Quality Jobs program
• $4.2 million in new jobs training
• $300,000 for customized job training
• $412,500 worth of recruitment assistance
• Sales tax exemption on personal property under the Chapter 100 program

Local incentives:

The city of Columbia will buy the building at 2810 LeMone Industrial Blvd. for $3 million and will lease it to the company for $1 per year for 10 years with an option to extend it for an additional 5 years at the same price.

Boone County will provide a 50 percent property tax abatement on personal property for the depreciable life of equipment and will exempt personal property from sales tax.

According to another article in the Columbia Missourian, IBM has promised to bring 600 jobs to Columbia during the next 10 years. Given the $31 million incentive package, this means that taxpayers will be subsidizing each job by $51,670. Meanwhile, IBM will only have to pay its employees a minimum average annual wage of $43,750, and it will contribute zero property tax revenue. In exchange, IBM will provide exactly $10 in rent over 10 years.

Furthermore, because the city owns the property and is leasing it to IBM, the company will not have to pay property taxes on it — this is a bigger subsidy than the $3 million the city paid for the building. IBM will not be required to contribute personal property tax revenues for this facility to the state government, either.

The government shouldn’t carve out sections of its tax base, via methods like property tax abatements or tax increment financing, because this type of behavior shifts and increases the burden to those who do pay taxes. Additionally, this $31 million cannot be spent on other services, like education, or returned to taxpayers to spend in the private sector.

The incentives may increase employment in Columbia in the future, but given that the increase will come at such a supreme cost, it may not be worth it.