While the concept of enterprise zones was originally proposed by center-leftists like Robert Kennedy, it was quickly embraced by conservatives as their approach to fighting inner-city poverty. In the late 1970s, enterprise zones were pushed by Jack Kemp and the Heritage Foundation. And in 1982, Reagan proposed specific legislation to Congress to create enterprise zones.

http://www.heritage.org/research/urbanissues/ib80.cfm

If some of today’s conservatives like Mr. Lehrer now dismiss enterprise zones as “massive corporate welfare,” the wheel has come full circle on that concept.

And it should. As now structured by most states, enterprise zones simply don’t offer the kind of massive incentives needed; it’s still cheaper to hire skilled, educated workers from outside the depressed area without a tax break than to hire unskilled workers in the depressed area and train them, even with tax incentives. And even with reduced taxes, employers will have trouble succeeding in a depressed area with poor infrastructure and high crime.

Instead, enterprise zones have simply been used to camouflage the huge tax burdens in many American cities. The favored business gets a tax break so their taxes aren’t extremely high; but everybody else loses out.

That wasn’t how the original proponents of enterprise zones thought they would work.

Interestingly, the abatements you’re describing aren’t the result of “central government planners”. Rather, they are the result of individual locales acting in a quasi-free market, competing for businesses against other locales. And even when practiced at the state level, these really don’t seem as much like “central government planning” as just hard-knuckle competition against other states.

I doubt you’re going to get a change by focussing your attacks on “central government planners”. Left to the planners, there would be a lot more discussion of the external costs of growth (infrastructure needs, schools, police, fire, additional bureaucracy) before any of these tax subsidies were handed out, and there would be a lot less corporate welfare.

Your real culprit are the politicians who get to do the doling, and the local businesses in the Chamber of Commerce which rely on growth to grow their market share (like auto dealers and real estate and broadcast and print media). Don’t blame the planners.

http://americaspeaksink.com/2010/01/2010-more-baby-boomer-destruction/