A technology company that received an economic incentive deal that could have been worth $22.4 million has cancelled the grant because they failed to live up to the number of jobs they promised to create. From WRAL:
North Carolina economic development officials on Tuesday canceled a $22.4 million jobs-creation grant for Infosys after the technology company failed to create hundreds of promised jobs in Wake County. Remote working trends were the culprit, the company said….Infosys, which employed more than 1,000 people in the state when the grant was approved in 2017, had pledged at the time to create 2,000 additional jobs at a Raleigh innovation hub — an expansion that was projected to grow the state’s economy by $2.9 billion. But by the end of 2023, it had only created 562 new jobs, according to documents provided by the state.
This is another in a very long list of so-called economic incentive deals that have failed to produce the number of jobs promised. Earlier this year, my colleague Joseph Harris noted that between the state’s two most prominent incentive programs, fewer than half of promised jobs have materialized. Moreover, of the 400 grants awarded by the Job Development Investment Grant (JDIG) program, nearly half have been terminated before the recipient managed to create their job creation goals.
Such corporate welfare programs unfairly grant political privilege to select businesses at the expense of taxpayers, create an uneven playing field, invite cronyism and political corruption, all while failing to deliver on their promises.
Politicians love economic incentive deals, however, because these deals provide a good publicity hit when they are announced, often including a public appearance at a ribbon-cutting ceremony (not to mention the opportunity for pay-to-play schemes).
But these politicians are nowhere to be found when the deals fail to live up to their promises.
North Carolina should get out of the incentives game, and instead treat all businesses the same and ensure that those businesses that succeed are those doing the best job serving customers, rather than those businesses that hire the best lobbyists.
