Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkestner | Hacker News Reader

The going deal is, if there’s a power failure, we’ll let you recoup your costs from the taxpayers even as you profiteer. The governor can be bought for a very affordable $1 million. Certainly the incentives are aligned to solve this problem! https://www.texasobserver.org/after-kelcy-warrens-energy-tra...

View on HN

If the costs do get passed to the taxpayer, let's hope the populace elects representatives who openly rip up the old contract and say "we're not paying". Flex the fickle power of democracy on the investors.

Also. Property tax in Texas is high relative to other states. So it makes sense to give Samsung a break on Ad Valorum taxes (not that a corporation with sufficient lawyers would pay them anyway.) They'll just make up the difference by stiffing it to the owners of all the new houses near the plant.

I can't imagine Samsung would put a plant in a 3rd world country like Texas unless they were getting significant tax deferrals from the state.

It remains to be seen if shifting the cost to taxpayers is harmful to the economy or not.

The ONLY reason to care about the "economy" is the secondary benefit it provides the "taxpayers". The health of economy and the people should never be weighed against each other.

Sure, lets analyze who benefits. The US benefits from national security by having a semiconductor plant in the US. The local economy benefits in Taylor Texas. Companies benefit from having a close semiconductor plant. People benefit from low cost chips. I think you may be advocating for more welfare analysis, which I completely agree with.

...but it will almost certainly hurt the taxpayers as a whole.

Not necessarily. Let's review our options: regulate companies to account for every disaster scenario, let the government plan and provide assistance during disaster scenarios, or do nothing and let people suffer and let companies go bankrupt. Passing costs to the taxpayers isn't the worst option.

Bad logic. If the governance e.g., TA is not manipulating market e.g. giving this sort of subsidies in case of failure then market could find the right place. Instead of behind the scene talks, a measurable study would be done and then fabs would be finding a suitable place to establish. I am not saying Samsung has not done studies on the location. Just pointing out the fallacy in the dangerous logic.

That's a lot of what-ifs with the assumption of corruption. There is no fundamental reason why companies and the government can't cooperate for mutual benefit.

There’s plenty of precedent for corruption with respect to tax incentives, see, e.g., what Foxconn did in Wisconsin:

https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn_in_Wisconsin?wprov=sft...

I'm sorry, am I missing some sort of evidence of corruption for the Samsung plant? Is that a serious accusation?

Evidence of corruption in Samsung itself is not hard to find. Absence of evidence of corruption in this specific case is not evidence of corruption’s absence. I remain skeptical of the terms of the deal either way.

Evidence of corruption in ERCOT is not hard to find.

It would be much harder to find evidence of fair dealing from ERCOT.

even if it's corrupt, although it's rare, sometimes corruption does serve the public interest, even if by total accident of competence.

Corruption as a least-bad alternative is not much of an endorsement, and likely isn’t a good investment of public expenditures.

Letting companies go bankrupt is a good thing. Letting people suffer without power is not.

Crony capitalism, the best kind of capitalism eh?

Hacker news comment of the year

Reply on news.ycombinator.com