Listen now (32 mins) | By Walt Hickey Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. This week, I spoke to Pat Garofalo who writes the wonderful newsletter Boondoggle. Pat appears in Numlock all the time, here’s a recent thing of his I covered in February: Lawmakers in 11 states have introduced bills for the 2021-22 legislative session that would form an interstate compact to eliminate tax giveaways to corporations. Right now, companies play states off one another, goading them into bidding wars over who gets less money to host the corporation. For many states, who see new businesses as a way out of their problems, this has become an increasingly standard practice, but if every time a company wants a new HQ it’s a 50-party bidding war, eventually we’re going to not collect taxes from businesses anymore. To avert this, the states are eyeing a disarmament, not unlike what Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas worked out in 2019. If the compact enters law, states will agree not to use tax incentives to poach jobs from the other states in the compact. This isn’t particularly new, as there are 200 ongoing interstate compacts and each state is in an average of 25.