Getting Foxconn to Wisconsin is going to end up being a ridiculous boondoggle. They’ll reap the rewards of massive tax cuts and Wisconsin will never see any upside.
Nearly everything creates jobs. An uptick in car crashes or a catastrophic flood would create crisis management jobs and all the insurance and construction infrastructure jobs that go with it.
Exxon Valdez was the most job creating oil tanker to ever sail. Think of the thousands of jobs that have been created to clean that up.
"creating jobs" is a placeholder for "economic activity" with the benefit of always making it appear positive.
It's a euphemism that's used when nothing more legitimate can be found.
In the business context it's insidious in yet another way. Deals and contracts that will make certain privileged people gobs of money is presented as "job creating" because people are needed to execute the deal or do the dirty work. In this case, the Wisconsin tax payer is paying $1,500,000 to foxconn for each job.
The focus is removed from the cost to society, who benefits the most, or the structure and merits of a particular event. They get papered over with the economic equivalent of rainbows and puppies: "job creators".
It's presented as "This is a non-zero net job thing!" without questioning it. This is a problem. Are the taxpayers squandering say $20 million for creating a minimum wage part-time, 2 week gig? Well let's not limit the opportunity here! Let's waste those 20 million dollars! We're just losing 99.9985% of our principle. What a great investment!
A bad policy fundamentally limits the number of jobs in the long run because by then you've already spent the money poorly, in a way that didn't lead to many jobs at all.
If you could "create X jobs" one way and that would lead to "X*3" jobs later on, wouldn't you want that instead of something that creates "X/4 jobs" in a temporary environment and leads to "create 0 jobs" later on?
If that's the only thing you care about; not the environment, type of job, structure of the work, sustainability of the practice, actual pay, health, culture, well-being of society, if it's only the total quantity of jobs, then it's still a wasteful squandering of resources because you can get "more created jobs" for less money many other ways.
We have to do better than just saying "ok" to every bad deal that comes along.
