This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 1st, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

Opportunity zones aim to provide tax breaks for redevelopment in some depressed areas, so how well do they work?

Some new evidence indicates opportunity zones are often windfalls for incumbent landowners.

Cato's Chris Edwards comments.

Opportunity zones were a part of the tax cut passed in late 2017.

One of the people who inevitably is a part of this is Steve Wynne

former I believe chairman of the RNC and our position at the RNC who thought well this would be a great way to shelter some income from taxes and that's sort of what it is they they try to build up depressed areas with some special tax breaks for the people

who buy and build or renovate in those areas, but how is it it how is it worked out?

So the Republicans passed what are called opportunity zones in their 2017 tax cut bill

and 8,700 different census districts or zipIPCOs basically around the country have been designated as

opportunity zones. And in those zones, if you invest in those zones, you build a new hotel

or something like that, you get capital gains tax. in those

own zones, you build a new hotel or something like that, you get capital gains tax breaks.

So you can look online at maps of every single town and city in the nation

has been divided up or bulkanized in between these sort of winter zones as I call them and loser zones which are the rest of the area.

So you can look in DC here.

Some poor neighborhoods, they don't get these breaks. Other poor neighborhoods or medium poor

neighborhoods, they get these breaks. So the first problem here is that there's this enormous

unfairness. The federal government has balkanized the nation.

Secondly, you can imagine you talked about Steve Wynne the Casino Magnet.

He was in Washington lobbying Trump in the Trump administration so that he could get some

of these special opportunity zone tax breaks because some parts of the country, these 8700 districts have been given these large

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