It's No Accident

Take a look at today's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette endorsement of $18 million in local tax giveaways and $30 million in state giveaways -- in the form of tax-increment financing (TIF) and state grants, respectively -- to the vampiric PNC Financial Services Group. The PG argues that:

"To be sure, the cost to the city, its public school system and Allegheny County would be substantial: 60 percent of the project's new property and parking taxes, or about $1.7 million a year for 20 years. But that's revenue that none of the government entities is collecting at the largely vacant and shabby-looking block now."

But note that nowhere does the PG give any evidence that PNC would not build its new skyscraper on that spot if it were not given the TIF. Nor for that matter does the PG give any credible evidence of appreciable job creation by PNC to follow from this development.

The bloodsuckers of PNC, like all top-flight banks, maintain a veneer of respectability even as they collude and profit with the most slimy bottom-feeders imaginable. They talk about how they do not do "subprime" loans -- more commonly and correctly known as predatory lending -- and they give some money to the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group. But they join with the loan sharks in opposing better banking regulations, and more importantly, they buy "bundled" predatory loans issued by others.

The PNC parasite has $93.2 billion in total assets with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of assets under management. The company is rated A2 by Moody's Investors Service, which is "upper-medium-grade" in Moody's terminology; in layman's terms, PNC would most accurately be described as "perfectly capable of building its own fucking skyscraper." As the Post-Gazette editors should know, companies of this size -- even financial services companies -- make location decisions based on a host of factors including access to a stable workforce, quality of the education system, necessary infrastructure, etc. Public subsidies are sweeteners that they see as their due in return for campaign contributions and fees to their "site location consultants" who play state and local politicians like a cheap violin; for companies of this size, the subsidies do not factor into the decision on where to locate and what to build, because they are so small in relation to the company's size and in comparison to other, more important factors. For cash-strapped local governments and school districts, they matter a great deal more, but that doesn't stop our elected leaders from giving away the store.

Here's an interesting factoid: PNC is paying roughly $2 million a year for the naming rights to Kevin McClatchy's playground -- er, the Pittsburgh Pirates' current ballpark. Their naming rights expire in 2020. PNC Park opened in 1998. This means that PNC will pay out roughly $44 million for naming rights to a ballpark built substantially with public money. With the state giveaways and local tax breaks for the new skyscraper, the government at various levels will be giving $48 million to PNC. In a sense then, the public is paying and then some for PNC to have its name on "PNC Park."