Rant on bad economic development policies. These are open secret. Samsung's application for incentives in Austin are a great teaching moment.

Samsung is applying for a controversial Chapter 313 tax limitation agreement. It is controversial because it often goes to business that where coming anyway. And in this case, Samsung has already bought the land for this project. This will be their 3rd 313 https://news.utexas.edu/2017/04/17/texas-lawmakers-need-to-rethink-chapter-313/

This program allows companies to get million in incentives for very few jobs. Companies actually undershoot job numbers to get their maximum dollars with few strings. Despite talk about Samsung creating 1,800 jobs, they are only committed to creating 45 total jobs.

They reiterate this point when they outline the construction jobs they will create and the direct jobs they will create. Remember these numbers. Up to 8,248 construction jobs and 45 jobs at Samsung.

In the same application they attached an economic impact statement. This is the company's justification for incentives. What will they do for the community?

These are often really bad, with very high estimates of the economic impact. But remember those numbers? Their application said they will create around 8,000 construction jobs. But their economic impact statement estimates 10,000 jobs. Ok, maybe that was a simple mistake. But...

In Samsung's application for incentives they are only committed to creating 45 jobs. But when they justify incentives, they estimate their economic impact based on 1,800 jobs created. Might as well put down 180,000.

What is shocking here is that I often find different numbers across incentive applications as companies game the system. But this is literally all in the same document. We are committed to creating 45 jobs but the headline economic impact number we will use is 1,800 jobs.

I am shouting in the void here. This is a game that is dominated by consultants and companies. But the crazy part is that this is all an open secret. Anyone paying attention knows what is going on here and they are gaming these programs.