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It’s October of a re-election year, so Gov. Kathy Hochul is boasting of plans to bring a huge chipmaking factory to Upstate — again.
Mind you, the giant Micron plant near Syracuse she announced four years ago is still years off, after repeated delays — and where its power will come from remains a mystery, too.
At least that deal was official that October; now she’s trying to win votes merely by talking about her hopes for a second plant.
The gov this week boasted to an upstate editorial board that she means to build a semiconductor cluster in upstate New York to rival Silicon Valley by following up Micron with another chip megafactory, this one in Oneida County.
Yet she’ll need President Donald Trump to get on board, since she’ll need billions in federal subsidies on top of state ones to get any major manufacturer to think about expanding in New York, with its high taxes, expensive electricity and heavy regulations, especially environmental ones.
Micron’s bribe package totals $25 billion in government subsidies for just the first phase, and it’s still taking its time.
Now state officials seem to be chasing a $45 billion proposal with a mystery company — possibly Solidigm, a subsidiary of South Korea’s SK Hynix — to build two fabrication plants and 5,000 jobs down the road (about half what’s promised from Micron in the by-and-by).
Give Hochul this much: She’s making her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, look like a piker with his Buffalo Billion “investments” — which also didn’t pan out.
(Not to mention how his plans for an Upstate high-tech hub wound up with a corruption scandal that sent some of his closest associates to prison.)
On the other hand, Hochul may be even more two-faced, since she’s simultaneously bragging about banning new data centers — another aspect of the same tech economy.
It’s all basically a scam, in any case: Even if these huge subsidies create a few new jobs in the state, at the cost of companies already here whose taxes will have to fund the bribes, it doesn’t change the business environment that makes those subsidies necessary.
Hochul figures voters are too dumb to figure that out; if she’s right, New York’s downward spiral will continue.