Posted on 05/04/2022 11:05:37 AM PDT by poconopundit
The Economic Development Fraud Watchdog group, Good Jobs First, has released a scathing report on the $1.5 billion subsidy package the State of Georgia has approved for the "unproven" electric vehicle company – Rivian. Greg LeRoy, the watchdog's Executive Director, offered the following analysis of the Georgia Rivian deal, what he believes to be the largest subsidy package for an auto assembly factory in U.S. history.
Good Jobs First is a non-profit, non-partisan research group on economic development incentives. Greg LeRoy is also the author of book, The Great American Jobs Scam, a landmark historical analysis of economic development fraud in the U.S. I highly recommend FReepers freely download and read selected PDF chapters of the book on the site. The book is so dense with fraud examples and complex schemes that it reads like a detective novel: there's no way you can absorb the contents of this book in one sitting. I bought the hardcover book six weeks ago, and it's so well-written and dense with new things to learn that I find myself carrying the book with me to read on my commute. The book explains the gaming-of-the-system done by Fortune 500 firms as they relocate business from one state/city to another — or pressure governments to provide tax breaks or incentives to retain jobs in a state. The job scams are enabled by negotiations (or colluding) with either corrupt or foolish state governments who basically give away the store -- and shift the tax burden away from big businesses and onto residential and small business property owners. The irony is these jobs scams are probably equally — if not more — as damaging as the practice of off-shoring jobs to a foreign country then selling the products back into the USA. The difference is the offshore fraud via Mexico or China gets press attention. So why are job scams mostly invisible to the public? Well, often it's because politicians purposely mask the fraud as a public benefit saying, "our film/video industry subsidies are bringing wonderful Hollywood jobs here" when in fact Georgia is paying massively each year for only a few thousand film/video industry jobs for Georgians. |
The Georgia Rivian “deal” was announced this week and it’s a huge $1.5 BILLION dollar incentive package.
This story analyzes the fraud from an economic development point of view— and the author says this is a raw deal for Georgia taxpayers.
Undoubtedly another of Kemp’s brilliant ideas.
Are GA voters as stupid as SC voters?
Ping
I’d be checking on which Georgia Politicians’ Campaign Fund Accounts (or bank accounts) got a Rivian Plus-up from anyone connected with Rivian.
That “author” is full of shit.
There are massive clawbacks.
If the investment and the jobs don’t happen Georgia doesn’t deliver and/or takes back monies.
Rivian currently has $10B cash on hand and plans to invest $5B into Georgia and is backed by Amazon/Jeff Bezos. Amazon/Bezos owns a 20% stake in Rivian.
Jeff Bezos is proven. And proven not to be a stupid businessman.
If you want to read about the local (Morgan County up in arms) perspective on this Rivan story, here's the link to my FR vanity on that subject a few weeks ago.
Do you have a link so we can read about those clawbacks?
Thanks.
Ftom last week:
“Amazon on Thursday reported a rare quarterly loss of $3.84 billion, owing entirely to a $7.6 billion loss in value of its stock investment in Rivian Automotive. Same with Ford, which said it lost $5.5 billion on its Rivian holdings in the quarter, causing it to report an overall loss of $3.1 billion.”
See #12
The pickup starts at $67,500...the SUV at $72,500.
I’m not a biologist, but that’s steep.
Last week, Rivian stock took a beating and perhaps they were hoping the announcement would cause the stock to rise again.
But that didn't happen. See the charts on the Google stock market page for Rivian. The stock shows a steady decline from about $180 a share to about $30 now.
I've got to believe this is not good news for Brian Kemp who's been championing this Rivian deal. The loss of Wall Street'sc confidence may cause Georgians to rethink voting for a Governor who's a succor for a raw deal from a formerly hyped company.
Here's another damning the financial story (published today) that sounds authoritative:
That a smokin’ find indeed, SmokingJoe. Thanks.
As compared to the Ford 150 Lightning EV which starts at only $40,000.
The monthly payments must be killer, especially on top of your student loan payments even having never taken any student loans.
Rivian made only 1,050 vehicles last year -- and no one knows how many of those were actually sold. Plus you can hardly call 1,050 vehicles "production volume" car-manufacturing. Tesla on the other hand sold 500,000 vehicles in 2021.
Has there ever been a more HYPED vehicle manufacturer than Rivian?
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