Comment by ianm218
14 days ago
If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.
14 days ago
If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes surely it would help though right? In theory the taxes would go towards pro social uses.
Which would be a good argument if the datacenters actually paid any taxes. They shop around for tens to hundreds of millions in tax breaks from officials who believe the lies like "we'll create thousands of jobs!".
TFA cites "Each project requires thousands of skilled workers during the two to six year construction period (nearly 10,000 in Mount Pleasant)" so maybe it's not totally fiction (at least during build time).
My sister dates a guy who works on these kinds of projects. He’s based out of Chicago, and goes to remote places like Idaho or Ohio to build them. They put him up in cheap temporary housing, I guess that generates some local money, but he’s very quickly moving on to the next job. They’re not hiring locals for these tasks, they don’t have the skills. The people who are benefitting are mostly local landlords.
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To me that's not sustainable. It just brings in outside workers, distorts the economy in bad way for locals through increased costs, distorts their daily life in a bad way and then it all goes away leaving a void in its wake. Like the olympics.
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If comrade1234 has to get contractors from 90 miles away just to clear some trees, there is no way they are going to hire locals to build a data center.
Some believe the lies. Some just believe in a good golf club.
City taxes don't fix a broken economic flywheel. State taxes go to others and also don't fix it. You need a functional economy with jobs, income, spending and all that jazz. A small amount of taxes with no second order benefits is worth relatively little.
Sure but progress over perfection right? More tax revenue puts you in a better spot to attack those problems than not having it.
Even just doing what Northern Virginia does and lowering people’s property taxes gives homeowners more disposable income/ lowers prices for renters which is a start.
You realize that Loudoun County, VA has the highest median family income of any county in the US, right? Its not an economically struggling region that needs permanent jobs.
A school and hospital would do that more than a data center tho. Look at Merced California, used to be a nowhere destination. They built a UC there and now it’s a place students, PhDs and MDs from around the world want to move to. If UC Merced were a data center it would attract no one, it would drain and pollute the lake, and Merced CA would still be a nowhere destination.
We’re talking about rural Wisconsin - there is no world where you need to make a trade off between having school and a data center. Put a school in one field and a data center in a field further away. It just seems like you should tax the data center and then build a school or whatever else you think would help the local economy.
A data center turns the whole town into an industrial zone because of the sound and water pollution. No one wants to live near one, especially not doctors and teachers with young families who can choose to live anywhere.
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Worth checking out
https://buildermuse.com/economy/every-state-offering-data-ce...
They often don't. In my area the locals gave them giant tax breaks in the hope of bringing in jobs that dont exist.
> If the data center was paying a decent amount of taxes
if my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle
This is a needlessly low effort reply that hurts the discussion.
Some data centers are paying lots of taxes and upgrading local grids, others are bribing local politicians or lobbying for abatements.
That is a much more substantive discussion than blanket anti growth.