Well bigdog your President Trump made a big deal out of saving 1,000 jobs at the Carrier plant in Indiana. Of course 1,000 jobs are still going to Mexico, those are jobs that aren't coming back. Originally Pence as Governor of Indiana gave Carrier a 1.7 million tax cut to keep the factory in the state. The trouble is the move to Mexico saved Carrier 65 million, so naturally Carrier gave the Governor back his 1.7 million and said no thanks. Trump raised the tax breaks to 7 million, paid for by the Indiana taxpayers, you know people like you bigdog. Why did Carrier go for it this time you might ask yourself? Carrier is owned by UTX a parent company, and UTX has defense contracts with the government of over 5 billion annually. Not doubt this was the leverage The Donald used to get the compromise.
This whole business of tax incentives to encourage business's to stay is the wrong approach to keep jobs in a given community. The job retention is ultimately paid for by the taxpayers, people like you bigdog, instead of giving your hard earned money to deadbeat citizens you are giving welfare to corporations, lucky you, lucky all of us. One study found that states spent on average $456,000 per job, on incentives. At that rate it would be cheaper just to give the displaced workers a living wage and forget the incentives. Of course then we would be paying people not to work, but that was an idea first floated by Richard Nixon, believe it or not a Republican. What he called subsistence payments, since full employment even way back then was impossible. Tax incentive that offset the cost of labor also give companies a stronger incentive to substitute automation and other types of technology for Labor, as long as they're not committed to a minimum number of jobs, that way employers can benefit from tax breaks while still lowering labor costs by replacing people with machines.
What we need is a system not paid by the taxpayer's, instead of rewarding companies for maintaining jobs in this country we should make them pay for the maintenance of displaced worker's and the cost of their retraining. After all it is the company that calculates how much money they will save when making the decision to relocate, if you raise the price for that decision and place the cost where it belongs, not on the taxpayer but on the company itself, I feel you would see a change in their collective attitudes. When making a decision to relocate if the cost of paying displaced workers money until they are retrained and can find new employment is paid for by the employer, it just might cause companies to reconsider the cost reward ratio of keeping their current operation. I think the corporations have a morale responsibility to the communities they leave behind.
