The Chips and Science Act was passed last year because regulations and a hostile business client for any company not in the white collar 'service' business caused the US share of global semiconductor manufacturing to drop by half since 1990.
As President Reagan once said, once government taxes and regulates a business so hard it dies, they will want to subsidize it, and that is true. Yet instead of cutting environmental paperwork down from the 5 years it now takes, plus 18 months to make sure virtual pollution won't change, they throw $52 billion into a pool and ask companies to compete for it. Yet if an American company can do all that other stuff, they then get told who to hire - union only - and in that small pool what favored demographics and “empowered community partners” the Biden administration dictates.
If that sounds like the nepotism of a 1930s mob boss, yeah, you will hire that illiterate nephew whether they can do the job or not.
American companies want little to do with it unless they are already political insiders, but Europeans are ready to cash checks. As bad as it is to anyone with economic sense in America, Europe is even worse. So Merck is getting paid by the taxes of American poor people to build a specialty gas plant in Pennsylvania. If they never get the myriad government approvals they need, it won't matter, they still got paid.
It's good for Merck, and they can even spin it that they are investing $300 million in return for getting $600 million, but the Chips and Science Act will remain "a spectacular failure" unless government fixes the biggest hurdle to American enterprise - government regulations and the desire to force companies to enact the progressive agenda of the White House.
