Who'da thunk it?
Who could possibly have known that Democrats Granholm and Obama's push to pick winners and fund battery development in Michigan to show they were doing something while pushing a green agenda and enriching their donors would have led to wasted money, few jobs developed, and a lot of the technology that was developed being scooped up by the Chinese for pennies on the dollar?
Well, we this was a story back in 2012 with A123s demise, but it takes the in the tank Freep two more years to write about it.
The Detroit Free Press: Michigan battery companies fall short of job claims
A quick summary: billions of dollars wasted, few real jobs actually created, lots of ribbon cuttings to make Democrats look like they were doing something and an impressive make-work failure to make any work.
The massive surge of Michigan tax credits and federal stimulus dollars that charged up the state’s nascent battery industry five years ago failed to generate the thousands of jobs that were promised.
Today, Michigan has only a few hundred battery workers in four plants — despite $861 million in Obama administration stimulus grants and $543 million in Michigan tax credits awarded by former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s administration in 2009.
Since the Freep doesn't like to do math and would hate for us to be underwhelmed by exactly how few "a few hundred" workers would be, let's be charitable and say 900.
With a total of 1.4 billion in taxpayer money laid, out that's $1,560,000 per job on the optimistic side, and it's likely an even more lopsided result than that.
Former Michigan Governor Granholm, of course, regrets nothing.
Granholm still doesn’t regard Michigan’s incentives for battery makers as wasted money.“Just because the jobs haven’t happened ‘yet,’ it doesn’t mean that cracking the code to vehicle batteries was the wrong strategy,” said Granholm, who is teaching at the University of California, Berkeley
When you're playing games with taxpayer's money, it means never having to say you're sorry.
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