How well did Wisconsin’s deal with FoxConn go? Politicians gave up something in the 7 figures per job that was ostensibly created on that project, but the state went into debt to do lots of the infra and the properties sit idle.
The F-35 is a defense project, but more than that, it is an unkillable jobs program distributed throughout nearly every Congressional district.
Politicians cite jobs created as if every “job” held equal weight. In fact, we have lost lots of salary jobs with benefits in the past decade, mostly replaced with independent contractor hours. Politicians don’t care because they are optimizing for the metric most commonly looked at.
Also, it creates a perverse incentive where no politician feels like they can ignore the bad metric because it is the good sound byte (a la “tough on crime” rhetoric when being consistent on crime is far more effective). Instead of working on healthier long term goals, they work on junk food goals.
depends - what if they favor a small industry over larger ones? (in the US the quintessential example is the coal industry vs. almost any other because of the insane way the government is elected)
