PayPal doesn’t want to move forward with a taxpayer-subsidized expansion project in Charlotte. Rep. Paul “Skip” Stam, R-Wake, asks a logical follow-up question: Where should the company go instead?
If PayPal strives to pursue a logically consistent course of action — and is not just knuckling under in the face of partisan political pressure during a highly charged election year — the company’s options appear to be limited.
From Stam’s news release this afternoon:
PayPal was incensed at the so-called failure of the legislation [House Bill 2] to include extra special protections for sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity. PayPal lawyers apparently did not realize that this was the same law in effect on March 16. PayPal currently maintains its operations center and main office in Nebraska and has a technology center in Arizona as well as a data service office in Texas- all states with similar discrimination policies as North Carolina.
The problem for PayPal is that 31 other states (and the federal government) also lack those categories for extra special protection. So PayPal would be limited to 20 states.
Stam goes on to suggest that “PayPal will need to limit its list further,” since 15 of the 20 “acceptable” states appear among the bottom 15 states for business as ranked by the American Legislative Exchange Council and/or the Tax Foundation.
Now PayPal is down to only 5 states:
Colorado
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Mexico
Utah
Stam adds a final kicker:
But PayPal has another problem: It does business in 25 nations where homosexual acts are a crime. So it would certainly want to reduce its footprint there. It would also want to stop its plans to expand to Cuba and would want to eliminate its operations in the People’s Republic of China. Each have brutal communist dictatorships.
Hopefully this research will be helpful to PayPal in its search for a new location more compatible with its principles.
