You too, Beth! I hope you like my upcoming article on the benefits of community banking.

Regarding Mr. Kroenke, kudos to HuffPo for picking up on this. Not just Stan, but THF Realty (his development arm), has made a fortune by building Wal-marts all over the region using corporate welfare, aka TIF funding. Not only may this be in direct violation of international treaties (just ask historian Kenneth Thomas at UMSL), but you and I pay for it over and over again, while Stan and Michael Staenberg (the other part of THF) get rich. Staenberg has gotten so rich, in fact, that he pretty much built the new JCC campus and fitness facility in Creve Coeur with his own funds.

People scream about bank bailouts (I count myself in that screaming group), but these kinds of corporate welfare bailouts (TIFs, transportation taxing districts, and other tax abatement options) have been going on for years. They are complicated taxing mechanisms, however, so the average citizen doesn’t understand them well enough to complain. Getting the word out will help. (I noticed that the CVS developer in Ferguson wants to use TIF funds to take care of the storage problem at the Sinclair station too. Thanks for drawing attention to that in another article here.)