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Mad about Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynold’s decision to waste money giving Apple a $20 million dollar tax break? You should be.

Iowa does not need to bribe large corporations to build big data centers here. We already have huge advantages that bring them here naturally. Electricity is their biggest ongoing cost and we have lots of low cost, reliable, renewable-produced electricity.

Iowa is also relatively free from earthquakes, has lots of water and our winters reduce the cost of cooling hot computer servers for half of the year.

In addition, there’s an Iowa sales tax exemption on the electricity consumed by data centers, a tax break worth tens of millions.

With all those built-in advantages, why did Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Apple gets tens of millions of Iowa tax dollars to do what they were going to do anyway?

The answer is the millions come from a broken state economic development program that is an open checkbook on auto pilot. The deceptively named “High Quality Jobs” program showers very large corporations with state tax dollars based on construction and building costs. The giveaways have more to do with fattening the bottom line than they do with the number of new jobs created.