The life of a politician was simple back when Majority Leader Chuck Schumer first entered Congress.
All they had to do was retrieve a hefty load of pork barrel spending to be a political success.
But Chuck Schumer’s payoffs for a risky $300 billion deal just landed him on the hot seat for a surprising reason.
In the process of helping pass the nearly $300 billion CHIPS and Science Act last year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer met repeatedly with Micron Technology executives who just happened to realize central New York would be the ideal place to build a new semiconductor manufacturing plant.
Taxpayers footed the bill for $-hundreds of billions in corporate subsidies
“Initially, the company will spend $20 billion to build its first plant, which it estimates will require about 5,000 workers for construction and initially employ about 3,000 manufacturing workers,” Brookings reported. “Micron has announced that these jobs will pay an average salary of $100,000—nearly double the region’s current per capita personal income (although the company has not announced expected wages for entry-level jobs).”
That sounds like a massive win for the region—especially more than a decade down the line when the company could implement its Phase 2 expansion which would mean the company would personally foot the bill for about 9,000 workers.
By 2025 those jobs would also supply another 9,000 “indirect jobs” as workers for subcontractors would move into the area to support the manufacturing plant.
In turn, that growth is expected to lead to 32,000 “induced jobs”—workers employed to serve a growing economy.
Whether that actually pans out or not, those are the kind of big promises that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi made when they risked possibly kicking off World War III with Pelosi flying to Taiwan to meet with semiconductor manufacturers ahead of ramming the CHIPS Act through.
Schumer’s reward for almost starting WWIII faces backless from a surprising quarter
Few would argue that having more semiconductor manufacturing in the United States isn’t a good thing.
But paying such massive subsidies risks encouraging more companies to move their operations to geopolitical hotspots for a few years so they can reap riches when the saber rattling inevitably starts.
Now some of the leftists in Chuck Schumer’s home state are peeved about after the fact.
Rather than celebrate the region’s good fortune – albeit on the dime of American taxpayers thanks to CHIPs Act funding and at the risk of starting a war between global superpowers – professors at local Syracuse University are wringing their hands over their “equity” concerns.
Leftists are horrified that the promised jobs will make poor people look comparatively poor.
Now they’re worried about inflation
They were so flustered about it that Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs held a forum to discuss the issue.
“[Stuart] Rosenthal, Maxwell’s advisory board professor of economics, raised another concern that the jobs the Micron plant brings could lead to income inequality, saying that a set of highly-paid workers living in the downtown area could drive up property values and local rents,” Daily Orange reported.
“He said the effects could ‘make life challenging’ for lower-income families who currently live in the Syracuse city center,” the publication added. “Pointing to Syracuse’s already high poverty rates, [Yingyi] Ma added that where Micron employees choose to live will largely determine the potential effects of income inequality in the city.”
They may be couching it in leftist-approved terms like “income inequality” but there’s no denying they’re worried about price inflation.
Perhaps in the future, some in these academic circles will second guess indoctrinating students with the type of Socialist mindset that encourages devaluing the dollar with such corporatism.
Stay tuned to Blue State Blues for any updates to this ongoing story.
