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If Colorado comes up with a suitable payoff, about $360 million, then United Airlines will put its new maintenance facility in Denver, unless some other locale comes up with a bigger bribe in exchange for 6,000 jobs.
Douglas Bruce must be right when he says state taxes are
too high. We must be overtaxed if the state treasury can
spare $360 million for a government-business
partnership.
Our state government always says it doesn't have enough money for education, transportation, parks and other customary responsibilities -- but now it just found $360 million? Where was that $360 million when the legislature was pruning the school finance act? Or when the state was stealing lottery funds for prison construction?
The United deal promises 6,000 jobs, financed to a great extent by taxes on existing employees and employers. The existing enterprises have financed everything to date, and now the state will turn around and spend the money on a new project. This resembles the Jennifer Syndrome, wherein a woman struggles to put her young husband through law school and to establish a practice, and then a few years later, he dumps her for a nubile tart.
Some analysts, such as Amory Lovins, can cite numbers which demonstrate that if the $360 million were invested in existing enterprises, then far more than 6,000 jobs would be created.
If you get 6,000 jobs for a $360 million investment, then each job requires a $60,000 investment. In agriculture, there is an average investment of $16,875 per job -- so $360 million invested in Colorado agriculture would create 21,333 jobs, or 15,333 more jobs than the same investment in United Airlines.
Farm work isn't very pleasant. That's okay. Each air-conditioned service job takes an investment of only $10,302. That's 35,000 new jobs if our state government is indeed suffering from a compulsion to create jobs in metro Denver, and wants to go about it efficiently.
Or maybe it's just a problem selling Denver real estate -- they need to create some demand. Then take the $360 million and invest it at 8 percent, for an annual income of $28.8 million. The average welfare payment is $379 a month, so this would provide for 6,332 welfare households -- 332 more new occupants than the United deal.
Another possibility is that somebody might take the
equal protection
clause of the Constitution
seriously. If the state is willing to give United Airlines
$60,000 for each job it brings to Denver, then the same
deal should hold for anybody. I mentioned that to a friend
who has 25 employees. He said he'd locate in Denver
tomorrow morning if the state handed him $1.5 million.
By any standard -- political, economic, moral -- the United proposal is disgusting and abhorrent. Which probably explains why the governor and the state legislature are taking it so seriously.
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