Our Money, Their Profits

Jul 31, 2017

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and U.S. Representative Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, happily announced at the end of July the expected arrival of Taiwan corporation Foxconn in Wisconsin. The company has promised to build by 2020 an enormous factory, to manufacture flat screen panels, that supposedly will mean 3,000 new jobs.

The state competed with other states to woo the corporation. Wisconsin offered the most money: 1.5 billion dollars in property tax abatements and 1.35 billion for job creation, plus more tax breaks for contractors building the facilities. It comes to about three billion dollars–or one million per job!

With that money the state of Wisconsin could have put 3,000 people to work for 25 years–fixing roads, repairing sewer lines, teaching classes, etc.

Every politician in every state has told voters that business subsidies, by means of tax cuts or special deals or loans or bonds, help the state and local jurisdiction. It means jobs, they will tell us. Of course, a look at each state’s web site on job development shows mostly blank spaces for number of jobs created.

No, what these corporate subsidies mean is a drain on the economy–that much less income for new roads, new water pipes, new schools, etc.

That’s what capitalism is today–a parasite feeding off of public money.

And the bigger the corporation, the more it grabs. A think tank called Good Jobs First has been keeping track of federal and state subsidies to corporations since 2000. They found that the biggest corporations in the U.S. are the ones gaining the most subsidies–and that doesn’t even include the 2008 bank bailouts worth trillions of dollars. So Boeing, Raytheon, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, Google, ExxonMobil, Shell, head the list for corporate subsidies.

The schools your kids need, the roads and water system your family needs–the money needed for them is sitting in the bank accounts of these corporate thieves.