Do I blame businesses for applying for grants (free money) when it is offered? Of course not. After all, the LEDC skims over $300,000 in sales tax revenue every year and wastes almost all of it on idiotic projects like the ‘business park’….and they PAY Mandy Walsh $101,000 in salary and benefits to do it! So, seeing taxpayers get a sliver of their money back that was stolen by government morons in the first place is a good thing.
Of course, I would prefer that that $400,000 is never skimmed in the first place and is LEFT in the hands of those who actually earned it….rather than people having to go to a group of overlords (Walsh, deGraffenreid, Monroe, Talbert) and beg for their own money back.
Furthermore, I don’t trust that group of overlords to know what the hell they are doing, since NONE of them has ever owned a business and probably don’t even know the difference between ‘revenue’ and ‘profit’. So you’ll pardon me if I wanted to see how much they gave to whom and if any of it makes any sense at all.
I’d argue that some places on this list deserve more and some deserve zero. But that’s the nature of an arbitrary cash grab run by dunces: somebody (and probably several somebodies) is going to get hosed hard while others get a windfall they don’t deserve. I leave distinction to you, dear reader.
Some businesses will probably be miffed that I’m making this public. I don’t really care. The grant applications made it very clear these are tax dollars and subject to public disclosure. As the old saying goes: with government shekels comes government shackles.
So, without further ado:
One thing is sure: barbers, hairdressers, bartenders and servers got screwed the hardest during this whole forced shutdown. Must have driven them crazy to see people cramming into Wal-Mart legally while THEY weren’t allowed to even cut ONE person’s hair. Talk about a screw job.