OPINION:
The Associated Press came out with a cost estimate of how North Carolina’s so-dubbed “bathroom bill” — you know, HB2, the one that makes clear that boys must stay in their own restrooms, and girls, likewise — is going to cost the state $3.76 billion over the next dozen or years.
What the estimate is based on is the hope and prayer that nobody asks questions. Because under scrutiny, the numbers pretty much crumble.
The AP’s estimates, which took front and center while making the media cycle’s 24-hour rounds, derived its figures from the fact that the NCAA dropped North Carolina from its list of potential host states for basketball tournament play, and that some artists, like Bruce Springsteen, and businesses, like Deutsche Bank, have similarly turned eyes elsewhere for performances or developments.
According to the AP, the loss to North Carolina from conventions, concerts and sporting events that have already been cancelled figures around $196 million. And before the end of 2017, that number will grow by another $545 million — and continue growing, until it reaches $3.76 billion by 2028.
Oh puh-leeze. Can the AP really predict out that far?
“The AP analysis,” AP itself writes, “compiled through interviews and public records requests, represents the largest reckoning yet of how much the law, passed one year ago, could cost the state. The law excludes gender identity and sexual orientation from statewide anti-discrimination protections, and requires transgender people to use restrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates in many public buildings.”
Let’s dial this back a bit, OK? So North Carolina reportedly lost out on a PayPal facility that would have added an estimated $2.66 billion to the state’s economy. Really, it was a 400-job project set for Charlotte. And North Carolina lost out on 700 jobs from CoStar and another 250 jobs from Deutsche Banks. The state also lost out on a Ringo Starr concert that would have bolstered a local town amphitheater’s revenues by about $33,000, and a Springsteen show that led to refund of 15,000 or so tickets. The NCAA tournament is going elsewhere. The NAACP, meanwhile, has called for a boycott — but not just in North Carolina. Nationwide. And Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan has issued a statement about his personal conversations with many business leaders who’ve said they took their projects outside of North Carolina, due specifically to the bathroom law.
That’s the loss statement. Now for the profits.
How to explain North Carolina’s sure and steady revenues’ growth — fully six months after the passage of this supposedly hated bathroom bill? According to federal statistics, North Carolina touted, in this post-bill-passage climate, the 10th faster-growing economy in the nation.
Inexplicable? Coincidence? Sheer luck?
Here. Let’s take a stab at what’s going on here.
Perhaps, for every self-righteous, politically correct business chief or musical artist who’s been raising a ruckus in the media over this so-called discriminatory law, there are 10 more who are quietly applauding.
Or maybe they’re not even that quietly applauding. Maybe it’s just that the pro-LGBTQ element in the press is outright ignoring these cheering portions of population because they go against the mantra the media wants to sell — the one where mean ol’ conservatives are not just discriminatory, but also elitist because they’re not thinking of the poor and all the jobs, jobs, jobs that are being lost.
Come to thing of it, maybe this whole “I’m so Mad at North Carolina for Being Anti-LGBTQ” message is purely press fueled and fabricated, and that the proof, A) is in the federal government’s own state-by-state growth statistics and B) the fact that the half of N.C. voters who said they supported the law also said they were being silenced because they supported the law.
“In the small rural town of Faith, for instance,” NPR wrote in May 2016, at the height of discussions about the bathroom law, “residents [supporting the law] say their point of view is getting lost in the noise.”
Interesting.
Know what else is interesting?
The fact that AP’s analysis also fails to take into account what businesses may come into North Carolina in the future — what artists may fill the state’s concert venues in the future — for reasons tied to support of the bathroom law, or for reasons not tied to anything other than the state’s pro-business climate, for that matter. So can AP’s analysis be called scientific? Proof in the pudding? Hardly. Rather, it’s more a “take with a grain of salt” type of study.
One that serves to generate shock and awe headlines — but one that also fails to contribute in any meaningful factual way to the discussion of North Carolina’s bathroom bill. It’s just not possible to predict what North Carolina’s business climate will be in the next 12 years based on the cancellation of a handful of concerts, the rethinking of a handful of business plans, the stated changes of heart of a few sports officials.
Then there’s this, from Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, cited in the AP report: “The effect is minimal to the state. Our economy is doing well. Don’t be fooled by the media.”
And as one example of how the media’s biased against the bathroom bill, he told how the state’s due to host an equestrian competition in 2018 that’s likely to provide a larger revenues’ boost to the state than all the sporting events that have canceled.
Here’s AP’s reply: “But AP’s analysis shows the economy could be growing faster if not for projects that have already canceled.”
But that’s any state — that’s any state economy. And that’s any state’s economy for any number of reasons — not just reasons that could be tied to a bathroom bill.
If AP’s conclusion for its statistical analysis is that North Carolina could be growing faster than it’s already growing, if only wayward Republicans in the political world hadn’t passed this bathroom bill — well, then, that’s not much of a conclusion at all, is it. Rather, that’s just stating the obvious in a way that makes a political punch — a liberal political punch, of course.
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