Despite being an Intel Product Dealer for about ten years I have no inherent bias against the company seeking over a billion dollars of taxpayer aid for their proposed project in Luther Forest. They have a reasonable product that has produced competition for the biggest CPU maker in the world.
Harrison and Bluestone outlined the phenomena of corporations playing communities off each other with publicly funded economic incentives. The book, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry, cannot be said to run parallel with the current situation in Luther Forest, but it does reveal a tactic employed by those seeking corporate welfare.
If politicians can promise jobs in an environment racked with over taxation, regulation and soaring worker compensation costs, maybe that litany won't be scrutinized so closely. Small business is responsible for almost half the jobs in this country. Usually they can't afford to lobby or influence beyond their own associations.
Jobs are good and we need to stop the constant brain drain of educated youth in New York. Asking every tax payer to fork over a hundred dollars in taxes for somebody else's business is not an investment per se. It is simply exercising the authority of power over everyone who might have a better use for that money.
It's not the job for the government to tax and re-invest the money in a private interest. The poor business climate is due to high taxation and regulation. What happens in two years when AMD pulls out of the deal and all that money has been earmarked for special projects ? We're not trying to rain on anybody's parade, but let's do it right the first time. Attract high tech business on the basis of competing local and state factors that are not dependent on a destroyed business climate or stacked with favors based on taxation of others.