DANA POINT, CALIF.–Minutes before Charles Koch took the stage to rail against corporate welfare at the gathering of his donor network, Gov. Scott Walker sat down for an interview with reporter Mike Allen. Allen asked a tough question about Walker’s proposed corporate welfare for Milwaukee’s NBA team. Here was the exchange:
MIKE ALLEN: Now, Governor, as you know, what a number of your fellow small government conservatives are saying to me is, how in the hell could you support using taxpayer money for a stadium for an NBA team co-owned by a billionaire raising money for Hillary Clinton?
GOVERNOR WALKER: Yeah, because in the end it’s like any business person. My state gets $6.5 million a year every time the NBA play–or every year the NBA plays basketball in the State of Wisconsin. If they leave, I lose that.
For a fraction of that, I get to keep that team in the state. I get the owners, including the previous owner, to put up a quarter of a billion dollars to build it, and I get to put a fraction of that in and I get to keep the money and expand it, not out of some projection; that’s actual income tax that’s paid in the state of Wisconsin.
So, if you’re a business owner and you’ve got a business and one of your biggest customers says, “You’ve got to upgrade your facility or I’m going to take my business somewhere else,” anybody who is smart in business is going to make sure that they keep that business by building a facility that matches their needs.
