More corporate welfare for tech companies
By PAT
GAROFALO
Those officials reaped a whole lot of good press, with questions regarding what Intel was promised in subsidies relegated to the bottom of most news stories.
But the details are now public:
Intel will receive more than $2 billion from Ohio taxpayers — in the form of a
$600 million “onshoring grant” (whatever that means), $691 million in
infrastructure, and $650 million over 30 years in income tax breaks. That total
doesn’t account for the fact that Intel will pay no property taxes to the city
of New Albany, where it will be located, for 30 years.
All
that for 3,000 permanent jobs, meaning we’re talking well north of $650,000,
and maybe even nearing $1 million, per job created.
But
I don’t want to dwell too long on the specifics of Ohio’s deal with Intel,
because there’s something much bigger at work here: The Chip Wars, as
I’ve dubbed them, are heating up, and revealing some of the tensions between
national needs and extraction from local communities.
First,
to review, TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer, received hundreds of millions for
a new plant in the Phoenix area. Then it was Samsung’s $1.9 billion deal for a
plant in Texas. Then Intel’s Ohio deal cleared $2 billion.
Following Amazon’s Lead
The
trend is pretty clear: Climbing costs to bring semiconductor manufacturing to
particular places, even though the number of jobs these deals create don’t
match such lofty expenditures. Intel’s CEO has previously said he aims to replicate Amazon’s HQ2
search, in which states and cities all over the place bid on that
corporation’s “second headquarters”; the semiconductor manufacturers are indeed
recreating that effort.
And
then there’s New York: It has two potential semiconductor plant sites that
state leaders have been hopelessly hawking for a long time: One at the White
Pine Commerce Park in Onondaga County and one at what’s known as the STAMP site in
Genesee County.
The
latter is particularly embarrassing because the state and localities sunk tens of millions of
dollars into building a corporate campus there, and it just sat
empty until the state coughed up an additional $4 million per
job subsidy to get Plug Power, a clean energy company, in
there.
Desperation
in New York
New
York Gov. Kathy Hochul claims to be actively negotiating with a semiconductor
manufacturer for the Onondaga County site — and of course, she won’t say which one or
provide any others details — but we’ve heard that one before: New York was a
stalking horse for both the Samsung plant in Texas and the Intel plant in Ohio,
used to gin up more local payments rather than an actual location that was in
the running. The desperation in New York to get something, anything, that
smells like semiconductor manufacturing into one or both of those sites is
palpable.
My
guess is that if New York does “win” a semiconductor plant, the subsidy deal
will be truly massive. The Empire State has a bad history on this score: Global
Foundries received about $1.4 billion from
the state for a chip manufacturing facility.
But
there’s another New York angle worth exploring, and it moves us from state
capitals to the U.S. Capitol Building. New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, the current
Senate majority leader, has been a driving force behind what’s known as the
CHIPS Act, which stands for Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce
Semiconductors. That bill would provide $52 billion in federal incentives to
promote chip manufacturing in the U.S. And it makes sense that Schumer is
pushing this, as his state has two embarrassing sites that it really wants a
semiconductor manufacturer to fill.
The
U.S. Senate passed the CHIPS Act as part of a larger package over the summer,
and this week it’s scheduled for a vote in the House as part of what’s called
the Competes Act, a broader bill aimed at addressing America’s economic
competitiveness with China. The Competes Act cleared a procedural vote in the
House yesterday with a vote of 219 to 203,
so it seems pretty clear we’re headed for a conference committee between the
House and Senate since their respective versions of the bill — CHIPS excepted —
are pretty different.
Taiwan
Vulnerable
And
herein lies the tension: It is actually a
problem that so much of the world’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity is
located elsewhere in the world, including a big chunk in Taiwan, where the
security situation is, let’s just say, not great. Just 12% of
production capacity is in the U.S., for a product that is integral to
everything from cars to computers.
The
Commerce Department recently reported an “alarming” shortage
of chips that could result in slowed production and shuttered factories for a
host of goods, and a recent study found that the chip shortage is pushing up inflation for
the products that require them. So there is a national interest in having
semiconductors made here, so that we can at least somewhat ensure a predictable
supply.
But
the corporations that make chips know there are security and economic
resiliency concerns inherent to their industry, and are using that dynamic to
gin up massive subsidies at all levels of government, and then to leverage one
subsidy into the other. Intel, for instance, has said that it won’t complete
its plans for Ohio without passage of the federal CHIPS Act, never mind the $2
billion it already received from the state. So now, of course, Ohio’s
congressional delegation is hammering away for a vote on CHIPS.
In
fact, spreading facilities across the country is likely an intentional strategy
by these companies to have more federal lawmakers feel they have to carry the
industry’s water — which will probably work.
As
I’ve said before, I see the case for some federal support for such a critical
industry so as to not be subjected to the whims of other nations, but that
doesn’t mean communities should bear the load of national priorities. In fact,
a competent federal economic development policy would prevent corporations like
Intel and Samsung from using New York’s desperation as a fairly obvious ploy to
extract resources from elsewhere.
Instead,
the Chip Wars are going to result in a situation in which, yes, taxpayers get
the security of having a domestic chip industry, but via paying a price in
public subsidies that will be way, way, way too high.
Pat
Garofalo is the director of state and local policy at the American
Economic Liberties Project, the author of “The Billionaire Boondoggle: How Our
Politicians Let Corporations and Bigwigs Steal Our Money and Jobs,” and writes
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