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The skepticism is that the US is a place where the government isn't supposed to pick the winners and losers. If we want to go down this road, we should do what
by blackguardx 9y ago
The skepticism is that the US is a place where the government isn't supposed to pick the winners and losers. If we want to go down this road, we should do what what many Asian countries do and offer incentives for anyone to open a facility in a given geographic region.
Skepticism over the job creation part is because there are usually no guarantees with how many jobs the company ends up creating. In the Foxconn case, they could make the factory fully robotic and end up employing very few people. There will still be increased economic activity, but there seems to be better ways to generate it than singling out one company.
- nambit 9y agoIf there are better ways to generate it, then I'm sure they'll come to the fore. I agree that the practice is unfair and the government should pass some laws preventing it, but for the cities themselves, there's no better way to generate such job/tax growth. If you've seen Amazon's crazy hiring for the past few years, you wouldn't doubt that they'll create a lot of jobs.
- ceejayoz 9y agoMost of those jobs would've still been created without tax breaks, though. These incentive packages are a race to the bottom, transferring taxpayer money into major corporations with dubious returns.
- sanderjd 9y agoThis is true in absolute terms, but not true at the level of each locality. Those jobs will still be created without tax breaks, they just likely won't be created here (for nearly everyone's definition of "here"). I totally agree that these incentives are yucky, but I don't think down-playing the benefits to the "winning" locality is the right way to argue against it.