The story of the Foxconn factory, for example, is one of Wisconsin acting as if you can give a bunch of money to a company that smells of technology, and they will plunk a bunch of jobs for highly educated and skilled people in the middle of a region with relatively few highly educated and skilled workers. Which, it never worked that way. It never will work that way.
Companies go to places that can fill their staffing needs. Wisconsin, which has been systematically defunding its education system in order to re-route that money toward corporate subsidies, is undercutting its own ability to fill those staffing needs. I don't know that everyone in the state realizes it, but Wisconsin is stumbling all over itself to become the darling dumping ground for companies that are founded[1] in cities and states with the kinds of intellectual and entrepreneurial ferments you get around well-run and well-funded university systems to put their call centers, distribution centers, big boxes mostly full of robots, and other things they don't want to waste money putting in a more affluent area.
[1] I think "founded" is a key word, here, too. Supporting local entrepreneurship is the key to prosperity. Which mostly means getting out of the way of your entrepreneurs. If you get into a bidding wars to acquire the office where a company puts all their jobs that didn't merit being located at HQ, not only do you end up overspending - the people deciding what to bid aren't playing with their own money, so what else did you expect? - but you're also draining the talent pool that supports their growth.
tl;dr: The cart goes behind the horse.
If anything the workers left even more because there was even less attractiveness to be there.
If dumping on ostensible conservatives for wantonly doling out government largesse is wrong, I don't want to be right.
That said, FWIW, the greater context here is an article about New York getting in on the game, too.
As long as some places in strategic areas do the incentive thing, it’s hard not to.
It’s difficult though as it’s a prisoner’s dilemma type situation.
Definitely a bad situation and a story told a thousand times in the US
Additionally,it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon has seen the obscene amounts of money Microsoft is making pitching cloud security and general technical support to the government, and wants in on it.
Agree with all that, I suspect DC-NOVA will be a whole lot bigger than 25k workers now for Amazon.
New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1975, less than 50 years ago.
Detroit’s population started declining as early as the 1950s as companies moved to the suburbs.
New York has a world-class, diverse economy, and I expect it to continue to be a central engine of the American and world economy for our lifetimes, but it does require good stewardship to nurture the economy.
We may be on the cusp of a reversal of the great urban migration of the last several decades, with populations moving into suburban satellite cities as remote work gains acceptance, driverless cars allow for easier commutes, logistics companies and drones allow for easy delivery of goods to your doorstep, and urban housing prices continue to relentlessly outpace wage growth.
The reality is that NYC is not Wisconsin, they don't need to give out money.
EDIT: I'd even go a step further, and predict that both Amazon and Google will also have ludicrously large presences in the DC-NOVA area in 10 years as well. In fact, Amazon's presence in the DC-NOVA area will be even bigger than they initially said it would.