With a price tag of well over $1 billion, Texas set a new record with its subsidy gift to Samsung to build a semi-conductor factory. An Austin American-Statesman analysis found that local, county and state subsidies add up to $981 million, and that excludes roughly $260 million in Samsung-benefiting infrastructure improvements that the public will pay for.
Good Jobs First Executive Director Greg LeRoy told the American-Statesman such huge subsidies “seldom pay off for local governments, in terms of generating enough new tax revenue to offset costs associated with the increased demand for services that the projects create.
“If Samsung is going to be the most valuable property in the city and is going to induce a lot of growth, everybody else is going to get stuck with higher property tax bills and higher property tax rates to cover that growth” if the company isn’t paying its fair share, he told the paper. “There is no such thing as free growth.”
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