Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

From the article: "This is a program which provides very generous benefits in exchange for real commitment to create new jobs. ... In the first full year of operation in 2014, 76 jobs were created statewide. At a cost of more than $40 million for advertising and marketing..."

No wonder this was criticized by the state auditor.

State job-incentive creation programs are generally ineffective. CBS reported that the typical Government expenditure per job is $475,000.[1] In many cases, jobs are not created, just moved.

Amazon managed to get $2.3 million per job out of the State of Texas.

Tesla's "Gigafactory" opens soon. I'm looking forward to finding out the actual employee count. I suspect it will be far smaller than the promotional numbers.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/do-subsidies-and-tax-breaks-real...

> Amazon managed to get $2.3 million per job out of the State of Texas.

That $2.3mm number ignores the 2,500 jobs and $200mm in capital investments that Amazon agreed to pay to wave off the $269mm in uncollected sales tax. [1] They've actually gone above and beyond those numbers (3,500 jobs and $300mm invested as of 2014) in addition to actually paying sales tax in the state, which yielded another $327mm in sales tax revenue just from 2012-2014.[2] So discounting the tax revenue that they're now receiving, Texas paid $16,571 for each of those 3,500 jobs.

[1] http://comptroller.texas.gov/news2012/120427-Amazon.html [2] http://www.mystatesman.com/news/business/did-texas-big-amazo...

In Nevada, Tesla projected more than 700 jobs by the end of 2015.

The state got 272.

http://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2016/03/01/one-view-...

Yes, states seem to do incentives like that on a "trust me" basis. You'd think they'd dispense the incentives after they got copies of the tax witholding forms showing the wages of the employees in the newly created jobs, but no.

State job creation works when you simply pay people to do stuff, like the WPA did in the 30s. The problem is that these days you have a dozen heavy machines to do what hundreds of people did, and the machines are very expensive.

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