Ford Offers to Sell 300 Jobs to Ottawa
Ford confirmed yesterday that $16.5m in bribes public money from the province of Ontario was a crucial factor in its decision to reopen the Essex Engine plant in Windsor, Ontario. The Toronto Star reports that Ford says it will expand the Windsor reopening to include a further 300 jobs, but only if the Canadian federal government makes with more pork. "We are not able or willing to move forward with the second phase of the project until we can find resolution to all the issues we have outstanding with the governments," said FoMoCo group VP Joe Hinrichs. Translation: we won't add more output without more federal assistance input. For perspective, some 900 jobs were lost when the factory was shuttered by Ford in November, 2007. Naturally, CAW President Buzz Hargrove is lending his considerable extortion negotiating experience to the project, arguing that the 300 additional jobs would surely be worth a few mil in taxpayer lucre. The sad part? With Canada's manufacturing sector in the statistical scrap heap, Ottawa just might go for it.
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Is that a real book cover? It's hilarious. At any rate, the first step for both the US and Canada is the passage of a law requiring federal approval of all tax breaks and subsidies to businesses to ensure that they are not just stealing jobs from within the country at taxpayer expense. The next step is for countries of similar business environments to create federations which keep them from doing the same thing to each other. IOW, US and Canada get together and keep from subsidizing a company from crossing their borders, but allow each other to keep jobs from going to Mexico. Eventually, the practice will thus end as the blocs get big enough that it becomes a non problem. The real beauty of this is that it could stop the stealing of poor people's sales taxes to build new stadiums for sports franchises full of multi-millionaires.
Maybe Dalton will use our health tax money to help fund this. I'm still waiting to hear GM and Buzz clamoring for money to save the flex plant in Oshawa. BTW, sales numbers just released for March. I think I heard the loud "thunk" resonate all the way north of the border.
Just for scope and scale, Honda purportedly received $140 million in tax breaks and incentives for their plant in Indiana. That will be about $100,000 per worker employed there. Toyota is probably the king of raking in tax breaks and incentives to locate facilities, factories and suppliers. This is just part of doing business now.
RobertSD, +1. I don't blame Ford one little bit. Toyota has gotten sway with this for years along with just about every other automker and supplier. It's just Toyota, since it has been building whole new plants has done more than anyone else. Why should Ford not do it if everyone can (and is)? Part of the reason is that money turns over in the economy something like 19 times (I don't know why 19 is sticking in my head right now, but it's a similar number). So do the math. If a 50k job costs the taxpayers 100k it will turn over to the tune of $950,000 before it's done winding it's way thru the local or regional economy.