Leadership Quote by Jeanne Kohl-Welles

Tax breaks are framed here as a tool, not a gift, and that distinction is the entire play. Jeanne Kohl-Welles grants the business-friendly premise up front: incentives can be "vital" for attracting and retaining jobs. That concession is deliberate; it disarms the predictable accusation that skeptics of tax breaks are anti-growth, anti-business, or naive about interstate competition. The pivot on "however" is where the real message lands: absent "accountability", these deals stop being policy and start being a quiet wealth transfer.

The phrase "little more than loopholes" is doing double duty. It delegitimizes the technical language of economic development by recoding it as something familiar and disreputable: legalistic evasions that ordinary taxpayers can't access. Pairing that with "at taxpayers' expense" supplies a moral ledger. Someone pays. The only question is whether the public gets the promised return.

The context is the perennial bargaining table between state government and employers: credits for relocation, abatements for construction, subsidies tied to hiring targets. Kohl-Welles is implicitly arguing for performance-based incentives, clawbacks when job numbers don't materialize, and transparent reporting that lets voters evaluate whether a deal was smart or merely politically convenient. Subtextually, it's also a critique of the cozy ecosystem that forms around these programs: lobbyists, opaque negotiations, ribbon cuttings, and a baseline assumption that "jobs" justifies everything. She insists the state act like an investor with terms, not a benefactor with hopes.