Justice Bob Orr

I was at a meeting of the Triangle Chapter NAIOP, a group of local developers and others involved in the commercial real estate industry, on Thursday and witnessed an event that should gives any of us that talk in public pause to ensure that we know who we are talking to.

Former Justice Bob Orr was scheduled to speak at the event. The speach showed great courage on the part of Orr who was speaking on the evils of economic incentives to a very business friendly group. Orr ignored the death stares to give numerous coherent arguments against the use of incentives or "subsidies" as he called them to businesses to relocate to North Carolina or expand here; the main focus of his speach were the famous incentives given to large corporations like Dell, Lenovo, and Google recently which were tied to the creation of jobs in the area. There are in fact some arguments against the use of incentives, but the one thing Justice Orr came back to, as might be expected from a Republican speaking to crowd of business Republicans, was that "no one in this crowd receives incentives" (essentially the if it does not directly benefit you, why bother argument). The problem with this argument became apparent when at the close of the meeting the president of the chapter asked who in the crowd had received subsidies as part of a deal; over half of the crowd raised their hands. Then the president asked how many received incentives more than once, and about a quarter of the group had. Then the president turned to the representatives of Progress Energy and stated that "I could ask this all day and Progress would keep their hands up."

Paul O'Connor, a columnist for the Winston-Salem Journal, has written an interesting piece about a slim-to-none scenario that could unfold in the 2008 gubernatorial race. He apparently agrees with me that the candidates in the general will be Beverly Perdue and Fred "the Asphalt King" Smith. In the column, O'Connor lays out the makings of a "perfect storm" (some of which seem likely to happen) which leads to this conclusion:

The scandals involving Democratic House Speaker Jim Black get worse. Either Black gets indicted or others do. People go to jail. Hillary Clinton leads the 2008 national ticket, and there is no strong Democratic challenger to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Dole. Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue and Treasurer Richard Moore have an ugly primary in the race for governor.