Issue Position: Creating Jobs

Statement

Quality job creation has been a top priority of mine as Governor. My economic development efforts have already resulted in the creation of over one billion dollars of new private capital investment to date. My basic philosophy is that government needs to get out-of-the-way of job creators -- our innovators. State government's role is to provide a stable and business-friendly education, tax and regulatory environment in which our employers can grow. The role of the Governor is to serve as the top economic development leader and promoter for the state.

My job creation plan is to:

* Complete the transformation of the Arizona Department of Commerce into the Arizona Commerce Authority. My Commerce Advisory Council, headed by Jerry Colangelo, recommended totally reorganizing the current Department of Commerce into a quasi-public/private agency called the Arizona Commerce Authority solely focused on job creation and retention. I have implemented as many of these recommendations as possible by Executive Order and will work with the Arizona Legislature on the rest during the next session in 2011.

* Maintain the job closing fund I created. I devoted $20 million from discretionary federal stimulus monies under my control to help close business relocation deals. Half of that money has been used to fund job training for Arizonans to be ready to work in these new jobs. Other states, such as Texas, have such a fund and Arizona needed one too.

* Enact tax cuts targeted at job creation. Tax reform should be focused on attracting high-quality, high-paying jobs to Arizona. That means we need to reform our tax structure in those areas where we are not competitive with our neighboring states and those states we compete against repeatedly for new business (e.g., Texas). I support providing tax cuts targeted at businesses that create jobs in the short-term and larger across-the-board tax cuts in the longer term to stimulate our economy. We need to reform our tax structure in those areas where we are not competitive with our neighboring states and those states we compete against repeatedly for new business (e.g., Texas). I have called for a phased-in reduction in our corporate income tax rate, where Arizona is higher than our neighboring states. Another area of reform is our business property tax, which discourages high-paying manufacturing jobs because we overtax capital investment. In addition, we need to modernize our tax code so that we don't discriminate against the newly emerging on-line or web-based industries.

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