Thursday, December 08, 2005

Chris Bell Takes On Gov. Perry

Damon McCullar has an excellent post up at the BurntOrangeReport about this, Bell Attacks Perry on Corporate Welfare. It's has to do with what Gov. Perry's been doing with the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF):
In a speech to a labor group in Galveston yesterday (speech, press release, fact sheet, article), former Congressman Chris Bell attacked the Texas Enterprise Fund as a slush fund for corporate welfare.

Here is where the facade falls down and we find out the dirty little secret behind all those big promises. Rick Perry says that he spent more than $200 million to bring more than 22,800 jobs. But earlier this year, the Legislative Budget Board reported how many jobs had actually been created. Anyone want to guess how many jobs we got for $215 million dollars?

It wasn't 22,000, not by a long shot. Anyone have any guesses?

The truth is so awful it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. For $215 million, the Texas Enterprise Fund only created 275 jobs as of January 31. Two-seventy-five. ThatÂ’s about a million bucks a job. Some of those jobs will become real in the future, maybe ten years down the road, maybe someday, if we squeeze our eyes shut and wish really hard, but right now weÂ’re paying way too much to do way too little.
I encourage you to click on the link above and read the whole thing.

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