Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
1–10 of 242 posts
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#2Luckily Wisconsin figured out the solution to this problem... Make the corporate welfare deals an order of magnitude larger and give 3 billion to Foxconn instead of a piddly tenth of that.
Even in the best case for "jobs created" (10,000) pushed by our politicians the state might as well just give 10,000 people $30,000 a year for 10 years.
Realistic estimates are saying the new jobs might be more in the range of 3,000, which is an astonishing cost of $1,000,000 per job.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#3cool, does YC's general counsel teach us how to do this when our company gets into the growth phase?
role model
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#4So $208M for 50 jobs. Wouldn't they be better off just giving those 50 lucky folks $4M each? Or giving 800 people $250K ? At least those 800 people would likely spend the money locally and stimulate the state economy.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#5Luckily Wisconsin figured out the solution to this problem... Make the corporate welfare deals an order of magnitude larger and give 3 billion to Foxconn instead of a piddly tenth of that. Even in the best case for "jobs created" (10,000) pushed by our politicians the state might as well just give 10,000 people $30,000 a year for 10 years. Realistic estimates are saying the new jobs might be more in the range of 3,00…
Indiana also has it figured out. We gave a ton of state money to a company to save face for a national political campaign so that they could automate the jobs away faster.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#6> We were highly skeptical of this deal when it was announced Aug. 24. In the fullness of time, we’ve subjected it to closer scrutiny. And now it looks even worse.
Oh great, so you carefully gathered data and put it into some sort of spreadsheet or something? Where's the spreadsheet? Where's the decision tree that shows this is a bad deal for Iowa? Oh, you don't have any of that actual diligence? You started with a conclusion and then wrote a bunch of B.S. with cherry picking and misleading statements throughout? This is why I flagged it.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#7Luckily Wisconsin figured out the solution to this problem... Make the corporate welfare deals an order of magnitude larger and give 3 billion to Foxconn instead of a piddly tenth of that. Even in the best case for "jobs created" (10,000) pushed by our politicians the state might as well just give 10,000 people $30,000 a year for 10 years. Realistic estimates are saying the new jobs might be more in the range of 3,00…
This hits home as a Wisconsin resident. Best case scenario, we're looking at 2042 to turn a profit[1].
[1] http://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/misc/lfb/bill_summaries/2017...
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#8So $208M for 50 jobs. Wouldn't they be better off just giving those 50 lucky folks $4M each? Or giving 800 people $250K ? At least those 800 people would likely spend the money locally and stimulate the state economy.
They aren’t handing Apple $208m. They are giving them tax breaks. If Apple didn’t build a data center in Iowa they would also collect $0 in taxes from them. The cost/benefit calculation is no where as simple as this article or comments make it out to be.
It could still be a bad deal, but there is not really an honest attempt to figure that out here.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#9I'm a programmer. Every time I go home to Iowa, people try to tell me that Iowa is now a booming tech hub, with Microsoft, Facebook and Apple "offices", and that I should get a job there. I try to explain why I probably won't end up there, but the point is that they are extremely proud of all of these data centers.
Re: Iowa's handout to Apple illustrates the folly of corporate welfare deals
#10It's stuff like this that severely damages the little credibility the govt has with respect to using taxpayer money. So few politicians are incentivized to save money, those who are cut costs in 'unneeded areas' like education and healthcare, and others go out of their way to burn money like in this article.
Edit: That said, and reading other comments here, I am curious just how bad of a deal this really comes out to overall. Perhaps the article is really just cherry picking arguments but it does paint a very grim picture.