While we’re on the topic of government picking winners and losers – and how it all looks suspiciously like a species of Bastiat’s “legal plunder” – The Wall Street Journal has a story about New York’s $1 billion boondoggle of a deal with Elon Musk’s Tesla. It’s a tale of government grandees using the public checkbook to buy jobs, social cachet and add support to the green agenda. It’s…not going according to plan:
New York state paid to build a quarter-mile-long facility with 1.2 million square feet of industrial space, which it now owns and leases to Tesla for $1 a year. It bought $240 million worth of solar-panel manufacturing equipment. Musk had said that by 2020 the Buffalo plant each week would churn out enough solar-panel shingles to cover 1,000 roofs.
The Tesla solar-energy unit behind the plan, however, is averaging just 21 installations a week, according to energy analysts at Wood Mackenzie who reviewed utility data. The building houses some factory workers, but also hundreds of lower-paid desk-bound data analysts working on other Tesla business.
The suppliers that Cuomo predicted would flock to a modern manufacturing hub never showed up. The only new nearby business is a Tim Horton’s coffee shop. Most of the solar-panel manufacturing equipment bought by the state has been sold at a discount or scrapped.
Sounds bad, right? It gets substantially worse, as this WSJ story from 2019 makes painfully clear:
State officials recently wrote down more than $1 billion in economic development investments on several high-tech projects across upstate New York, including the solar-panel factory in Buffalo operated by Tesla Inc., documents show.
And for the industrial policy fans who may still not get it:
“This is black and white evidence that they wasted $1.2 billion of taxpayer money,” said E.J. McMahon, research director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank.
And lest we think this is purely a New York problem or one reserved for spend-happy Democrats…the economic landscape is littered with Republican-backed deals that also squandered hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars:
Last year, states gave each of eight company facilities more than $1 billion in tax breaks and other aid, according to Good Jobs First, a subsidy tracker funded partly by labor unions. Until then, there had never been a year with more than three such deals.
In Wisconsin, a factory by Taiwan’s Foxconn that was to employ 13,000 workers in exchange for some $3 billion in state subsidies sits mostly empty. Suburban Virginia offered tax breaks to win a competition for Amazon.com’s “second headquarters,” but much of that project is on hold.
And that doesn’t begin to include the additional billions state and local governments spend building stadiums and sports complexes to house professional sports teams (whose billionaire owners are eager to take as much public money as they can get). (RELATED: Residents Of Host City Defeat Super Bowl Censorship Ordinance)
It’s all an expensive variety of welfare. The welfare queens of old were pikers compared to the corporate titans hoovering up subsidies, tax breaks and more from governments big, small, red and blue. As the New York pols are now seeing, it’s a bad deal all around. And always has been. (RELATED: An Inconvenient Truth: Elon Musk’s Government-Subsidized Hypocrisy)
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
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I seem to detect a faint odor of climate change, fan-fairing Democrats and RINOs associated with all the wasteful government spending.
Most private retailers have a “100% money back guarantee” if you’re not happy with your purchase of goods for any reason.
Any chance of me getting 100% of my federal income taxes back for the duration of this current administration? I am not happy at all nor have anything to show for all the money they’ve taken from me since Biden was installed as president.