Back on August 15th, local right wing radio talker Leland Conway put a post on his blog entitled:
God Helped Noah Build the Ark – He Didn’t Need a Tax Exemption
One day later, of course, David Williams slammed Steve Beshear’s dinosaur pArk in an interview with LEO Weekly — not that the two events are connected, it was just interesting to see these two loud Kentucky conservative characters attacking Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter.
So what did Leland Conway say?
Well, he appears to have scrubbed the post off his site. If you go to the page it once appeared on, you get a Page Not Found error. If you look at the calendar on the left side of his page, you’ll notice that it indicates no new blog posts between the 3rd and the 24th.
Why did he take the post down? I have no idea but, luckily, via Google’s cache of the page — you can still read it:
Grant County will be giving a 75% property tax break to the “Ark Encounter” theme park which will soon be built there. This is in addition to the approximately $47 million dollar tax exemption granted by the state. While, as a Christian I support this venture and see it as a viable business idea, I see no reason to grant them an exception over other businesses in the tax code.
The claim is that the Ark Encounter will create jobs so the tax break will feed back into the community, therefore everyone benefits and thus the tax exemption is justified. But what about businesses in other areas of the state, who pay full taxes and will not benefit from the Ark Park’s existence?
The time has come to end the government’s ability to pick winners and losers.
….Some of my friends have told me that if the Ark Park didn’t get this exemption an opportunity to create jobs would be missed. This is not a sufficient argument for giving some a favorable tax rate over others, but rather a stronger argument that our overall taxes are too high. How many more businesses would locate in Kentucky if we assured them of friendlier and fairer tax environment?
Nothing in the post seems particularly shocking. It’s not a separation of church and state argument, or even one about the ridiculousness of a 600 year old man literally herding T-Rexes onto a giant boat he literally built in seven days. Leland’s argument is that no one should get tax breaks. Government shouldn’t use them to entice businesses to this state or that, this town or the next. All such exemptions should be axed.
For whatever reason, Leland later decided he didn’t like that argument — though it seemed a simple expression of his natural views. Perhaps Ken Ham or his Ark supporters came out in droves to change Leland’s mind, or maybe he just decided, well, actually tax exemptions are a grand idea.
Here’s a screen shot for posterity:
***UPDATE***
After we posted this, Mr. Conway reinstated the post, stating:
….a reader brought to our attention today that this post had dissappeared from the site. Since we’re not quite sure what happened, we’re going with the “inadvertant keystroke” excuse. Oh well – its something that we thought was important enought to say twice anyway.
Whoopsiedaisy.
SHE WON'T GO!
THE DAILY YONDER
