Brookings: Well-crafted incentive packages go beyond tax breaks

The business community in Nebraska is preparing for an intense lobbying effort at the state Capitol to renew a business incentives package that expires at the end of 2020. Executives and economic developers have called it critical, but skeptics characterize the incentives as handouts. Amy Liu studies economic development at Brookings, and says well-crafted incentive packages go beyond tax breaks. She lifts up Virginia's efforts to land Amazon as a best practice. "The vast majority of the $3 billion incentive package went to training computer science engineers, to creating public transportation and to affordable housing," Liu said in a KETV NewsWatch 7 interview. "They were direct investments in public goods."