jfelbab said:
Wall Street Journal, April 3, 2002
Honda to Build Light-Truck Plant in Alabama - Los Angeles Times
In answer to your question, no, we in Michigan, couldn't even come close to matching those incentives. At that time a Republican, John Engler, was trying to trim the size of Michigan state government. In fact, the State of Michigan was outraged that so much money was going to subsidize competitors to the Big Three. Partly because of things like this, we in Michigan pay out more in federal taxes than we get back in federal dollars to our state.
And, no, it's not truly "totally a state incentive" - in fact, the illusion that it's totally state tax dollars as an incentive is a nice PR con job. The fact is that each transplant locates in a "greenfield" area that needs significant highway and rail spur improvements - paid with federal tax dollars. My federal tax dollars. here's a link to a 2003 DOT study for more improvements needed in Alabama, citing the Vance, AL Mercedes plant and the Lincoln, AL Honda plant: Study of US 43 and US 80 Corridor Potential, Alabama - Economic Development - Planning - FHWA
My tax dollars, helping to improve the federal highway system, for Detroit competitors, to help unemploy me. Nice. Real fair. And I really don't care about the payback to that state. Incentives like that, especially to highly profitable foreign owned companies, is not only corporate welfare, but on a national level, killing more jobs than it helps to create. The bottom, indisputable line, is that the Big Three lost more jobs than the transplants, including the few Japanese and German suppliers that located in the USA, ever created and ever will hope to create. What you have is a negative payback. Subsidized by the American tax payer.
Which renders the whole transplant-vs-domestic manufacturing cost debate invalid, because the true transplant costs are seriously blurred by the size of the huge taxpayer funded subsidies. The American tax payer has been unfairly funding the destruction of domestically owned manufacturing.
I understand that half the market doesn't like Detroit cars, but you don't taxpayer subsidize foreign owned manufacturing to displace existing domestic manufacturing. You don't want a Detroit brand car, fine. You want foreign owned brands to be built here, fine. They're profitable companies. Let them pay 100% of the cost of the plants, the acquisition of the land, the training of the employees, and the infrastructure improvements. All those things I mention - every f*cking one of them has been paid for in part, or in whole, by the tax payers, for every transplant. What taxpayer incentives GM, Ford, and Chrysler receive, including property tax abatements, drastically pales in comparison. Or else let them export to the United States, and then let's see how many current non-Detroit brand customers will continue to buy Toyota, Honda, and Nissan is they're all imported, rather than blurring their origins by using taxpayer subsidized manufacturing in North America. My best educated guess is, under those conditions, for all the carping about Detroit's quality, half the current non-Detroit customers won't buy an all import car brand.
Its quite obvious that the public doesn't hold the purse strings to their own money. Maybe Detroit should take a page from the Christian Right play book and really get into politics, grease some palms, because those are the guys/gals doling out the cash. Things might move faster.