> Amazon managed to get $2.3 million per job out of the State of Texas.

That $2.3mm number ignores the 2,500 jobs and $200mm in capital investments that Amazon agreed to pay to wave off the $269mm in uncollected sales tax. [1] They've actually gone above and beyond those numbers (3,500 jobs and $300mm invested as of 2014) in addition to actually paying sales tax in the state, which yielded another $327mm in sales tax revenue just from 2012-2014.[2] So discounting the tax revenue that they're now receiving, Texas paid $16,571 for each of those 3,500 jobs.

[1] http://comptroller.texas.gov/news2012/120427-Amazon.html [2] http://www.mystatesman.com/news/business/did-texas-big-amazo...

In Nevada, Tesla projected more than 700 jobs by the end of 2015.

The state got 272.

http://www.rgj.com/story/opinion/voices/2016/03/01/one-view-...

Yes, states seem to do incentives like that on a "trust me" basis. You'd think they'd dispense the incentives after they got copies of the tax witholding forms showing the wages of the employees in the newly created jobs, but no.

State job creation works when you simply pay people to do stuff, like the WPA did in the 30s. The problem is that these days you have a dozen heavy machines to do what hundreds of people did, and the machines are very expensive.