investments lose jobs

As I mentioned a few weeks back, the investment of taxpayer money has not yielded a reasonable return on investment of jobs. The Tennessee Business Journal did a little digging and crunched the numbers in a multi part series and concluded that the investments did not produce lasting results and in sourcing might have worked better.

From the articles....

Tennessee, through its FastTrack grant program, paid companies $27.3 million between 2008 and 2010 to train more than 6,200 new workers. By 2011, about 3,400 of those jobs — which the state invested in at an average of $4,388 a piece — were gone. If the dozens of companies that received that cash were required to give back the money, they'd owe the state about $15 million, our analysis found.

Likewise, companies that received $74.2 million in state infrastructure grants between 2006 and 2010 would owe the state nearly $21 million for the more than 4,000 jobs — an average of $5,246 apiece — that no longer exist.

In Middle Tennessee's seven counties, companies moving and expanding in the region between 2008 and 2010 got nearly $20 million — or $9,963 per job — to train roughly 2,000 new workers. By 2011, 585 of those jobs remained, representing a loss of nearly $14 million to the state.