Has anyone been following the recent reports by TimesUnion.com about all the funding that has been handed out to Big Corporations in the past year?
$400 million was reported to be given for the new Nanoscience facility at University of Albany, supposedly not to the benefit of a coalition of IBM, GE, and other big companies that the Governor wants to invest here in NY for high tech manufacturing. This investment was reported to bring NYers about 600 new jobs.
Over $5 billion has been given in the form of tax incentives and cash payments to GlobalFoundries for their Chip fabrication in Malta NY. Just recently it has been reported that they want to exchange some of the tax incentives for more cash from the State of NY. This is supposed to bring 1,600 jobs here to NY.
If we had taken the cash that we are handing out to these big corporations, which provides little to no economic relief to the local economy, and given it out in the form of grants to small businesses and entrepreneurs that need seed capital desperately to form new businesses, we could have potentially created statewide tens of thousands of jobs that we will never see. $5,400,000,000 split up into $100,000 grants/loans to small businesses would have provided 54,000 opportunities for growth. If they had stipulated as a condition for receiving this grant/loan that at least one job was created, that would have provide employment opportunities of 54,000 jobs. This dwarfs the amount of jobs these big handouts would produce by over 50,000 jobs.
Putting political views aside for moment (don’t get me started on all the things that are wrong with King Andy,) I am going to play devil’s advocate. The Small Business Adminstration say about of 80% of new small businesses fail in 5 years. So say each of those grants would have gone to new startups, and say they all fall into the norm in performance. That would have generated an immediate boom to the local economy for about 5 years. This would also net 10,500 + new companies that would have kept employment running for at least 5 years, and would still be functioning in 5 years, providing ongoing employment. That is still twice the positions created by all these handouts to Big Corps and would potentially spawn thousands of more jobs than the mandated 1 job per $100,000 grant.
Make no mistake, the reason NY is in the shape it is in is because of the current political system we have. Our governor, a Democrat, has done more in the past two years to crush the 99% in our local economy than any of the past three governors. There is no reason for cuts to services and the severe unemployment and underemployment that we are seeing now. King Andy is not working for NYers, he is working for Big Corporations and the rich who have funded his campaign. He is looking towards the 2016 Presidential Election, and he does not care how bad he has to crush New York to accomplish this. If you disagree, please feel free to comment.