Crony Capitalism: Dear Commissioners (052314) | Eastern North Carolina Now

Dear Commissioners,

    Why should my taxes be used to favor your friends and their private interests?

    If your friends have businesses and ideas suited for investment and return of principal and interest then your pals can find private investors and lenders to fund their ideas. Leave the taxpayers out of it.

    The transparent reason your crony pals ask for matching grants is because they do not want to share the proceeds of their businesses with either lenders or investors or because investors and the business's owners see the proposed business plan as unworthy of being financed. Cronies want access to the free resources that are provided by their political connections and politicians want to reward their pals at no cost to themselves. If these businesses are actually worthy of being financed, then put your own money to work in them. Leave the taxpayers out of it.

    The county board's history of hypocritically rewarding influential supporters at the expense of the taxpayers is at least as detrimental to the general welfare as your rancorous personal disputes and your lack of any common sense regarding capital budgeting.

    Between you, you have sunk $35,000,000 in an inefficient and over budget building program for the schools, wasted $10,00,000 on a joke at the EDC/C100, vomitted up a fifty year investment in a hospital and are now wasting millions of dollars in over building a jail at a failed industrial park.

    You are not market wizards, you are just regular guys with no investment success and only regrettable investment experience. We would all be better off if you had just left the tax payers out of it.

    Regards,

    Warren Smith
      Beaufort County