You make excellent points that are getting lost in the business lobby panic to find ways to throw money at the effort to "be competitive". However, you have also fallen into the trickle down approach that an R&D tax credit encourages R&D. There is no data that supports this myth and plenty that says there is no link between a state's R&D and a tax credit or that a bigger tax credit leads to more R&D. In fact after Oregon got rid of a small R&D tax credit, research expenditures in Oregon grew and after Arizona increased their tax credit to the most generous in the country they fell behind other states in their ranking for R&D per GDP. Oregon came in 4th in the country, Arizona 21st. The reality is that research centers are much more dependent upon historical business decisions than tax credits.
You make excellent points that are getting lost in the business lobby panic to find ways to throw money at the effort to "be competitive". However, you have also fallen into the trickle down approach that an R&D tax credit encourages R&D. There is no data that supports this myth and plenty that says there is no link between a state's R&D and a tax credit or that a bigger tax credit leads to more R&D. In fact after Oregon got rid of a small R&D tax credit, research expenditures in Oregon grew and after Arizona increased their tax credit to the most generous in the country they fell behind other states in their ranking for R&D per GDP. Oregon came in 4th in the country, Arizona 21st. The reality is that research centers are much more dependent upon historical business decisions than tax credits.