With Greed and Cynicism, Big Tech is Fueling Inequalities in America – Monday Note, Frederic Filloux
…In the end, local taxpayers will subsidize Amazon shareholders…
Hi-tech firms are prominent among recent tax-break “megadeals” awarded by cities and states. Tesla’s battery factory ($1.3bn from Nevada), Foxconn’s display-screen plant in Wisconsin ($4.8bn) and Apple’s data centre in Iowa ($214m) are typical. The Apple centre, a cloud computing facility, will have only 50 permanent jobs, so the cost per job exceeds $4.2m. The Foxconn deal, even by the state’s own official estimate, won’t break even for taxpayers for 25 years — an extremely risky time horizon given the likelihood of new technologies leapfrogging the company’s product much sooner. The Tesla deal was 14 times costlier than anything Nevada had done before.
