For people who can’t make it past the paywall— large tech companies who want to make an economic deal with public officials and politicians (for example, approval of a new data center in their city) have them sign NDAs such that they cannot say which company they are working with. This results in behavior like a city council reviewing a tax break for a company without knowing who the company is, and prevents the public from criticizing because NDAs prevent communication to the public on the matter.
Most NDAs don't hold during trial. Also, you have to prove that it was broken, what was released, how, etc... none of that is easy. But people don't know/are scared anyway, so what the article describes does happen anyway.
Ask a lawyer about Freedom of Information Act. I'm reasonably sure it isn't legal, but by the time you finish all the court cases the information is public because the company is operating thus making it not worth fighting in court.
I think the state code should forbid state officials from entering agreements that force them to conceal information material to do their official job. It's even more straightforward than conflict of interest limitations.
If the code does not do that, it should be amended.
I de-Googled my digital life long time ago. Refactoring now to remove the last pieces of personal infra from AWS. Suck donkey dong, invasive predatory cunts.
These restrictions are usually held to extend to the states, and from there all the way down to school districts. Basically all government at all levels.
States charter corporations.
Ergo, elected officials at any level may void corporate NDAs at will.
(then again, something along those lines is my solution to most problems involving corporations....)
When I worked at a state government agency, we would laugh at companies with these things as freedom of information and other laws have precedence over some NDA.
Texas is a weird place, but usually these laws are pretty similar between states. These economic development agencies are making a conscious decision to make this information privileged. I wouldn’t blame the companies for this at all — the government entities are the ones enabling this.
I recently listened to an old episode[1] of the “Reply All” podcast from 2018 after someone on HN recommended it. It’s a crazy story about Foxconn opening a plant in a small town in Wisconsin and the NDAs with local politicians made it difficult/borderline impossible for residents to push back because they didn’t even know what was happening until it was already approved.
An NDA is a contract, so how does a politician enter one without receiving some contractual consideration of value. No consideration, no contract, right?
When you leave a company, they typically pay you something to sign it.
I find the NDAs to be a bit of a red herring. The real point is what kinds of information must lawmakers be open about? The NDAs don't really matter here because if they restrict information you are legally entitled to, I don't see how they are enforceable. I mean what if there isn't any NDA, but the politician simply refuses to say what's happening. If citizens don't have any positive right to that information, what's the essential difference? You could vote the politician out later, but you could do the same for anyone signing the NDA as well.
So really I think the focus should be more on forcing politicians to be more open with their actions and for this to have the force of law. Then the NDAs become irrelevant. Of course this is an uphill battle since the laws probably need to be passed by the very people who are running the system, but I don't really see how that's avoidable outside of jurisdictions with forms of direct citizen initiatives.
You cant. Or I havnt been able to. You can tell a company that you object to it but most of the time they will make you sign it or walk away from the offer.
Instead of making NDAs illegal, the tax breaks should be illegal. Then corporations could not "shop" different local governments to negotiate for the lowest tax bill.
Then how smaller places with ambitions to grow and prosper could lure large industry? That way, the big and profitable industry, with its higher-paying jobs, would just concentrate around already rich places. This happens anyway: e.g. 14% of UK population lives in London. I don't think this process needs any speeding-up.
Less red tape, facilities and services, special attention in planning and execution of infrastructure and other development. It doesn't have to be money...
And communism could work if only it were implemented correctly. But once one gets outside that ivory tower of hypotheticals, all too often it would seem those tax breaks still end up being a net deficit.
See also: "Revenues from hot dogs and ticket sales means the sports stadium that we've so handsomely subsidized will pay for itself in a couple of years."
Almost every stadium deals in the US has been a disaster for locals. I'm not talking about the group of folks who get displaced and have no place to go. I'm talking about local shops, businesses that aren't into venue-related businesses.
But are they? Or is this just like pro sports stadiums, where the company/team reaps the lions share of benefits, and the town is mostly left with low income jobs and a pile of debt?
Of course the company will reap the lion's share. The town has to decide if the remaining bits are worth the tax break they give the company. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren't.
Worse. The tax breaks can cost you money overall in the long run but a politician might need to generate jobs so badly they will write off the long term bad trade off
As far as I know, in the case of stadiums and other relocation and retention tax breaks, almost every case of tax breaks have been less effective at economic stimulation than chopping up same amount and mailing reasonable chunks to random (or all if finely chopped enough) citizens in the area. That's postmortem analysis, not the rosy promises that never pan out.
This doesn't seem to be borne out in any research on this question within the past 40 years[0]. Only competent policy-making can decide whether a tax break, of any sort, will be beneficial to the local economy where it's enacted.
Obviously the answer to the question of "do tax breaks generate jobs/stimulate economic development" is very context sensitive; policies that work in San Francisco may be wholly unsuitable for NYC or Topeka, Kansas or what have you. But there is an overall consensus of data as to what generates good outcomes for towns/states and what doesn't in terms of job creation and economic development:
- Corporate tax breaks, by and large, do NOT generate more economic development for the cities/states that offer them and produce the smallest gains in job creation than any other option. They do however generate more wealth for that particular company.
- Income tax breaks for lower and middle class income earners are more effective at stimulating growth and produce more jobs.
- Strong unemployment benefits stimulate the most growth and economic activity and the most job creation by a very long shot.
The linked reports provide many citations for the points it makes. It's conclusions also align with everything we've been hearing and seeing for the past 20 years with our own eyes in the USA. I liked the observation made in the report that 3M, based out of Minnesota, saw corporate tax cuts offered to them by competing states wreaked of desperation in their minds, not business opportunity. Very intriguing food for thought. I have to say, chances are low that any other company would see this any differently. Its just that companies such as Amazon thrive on the economic desperation of their workers as evidenced by Amazon's own behavior.
On that last bullet point, I'm willing to bet the current "boom" in economic activity is due in large part to the generous unemployment benefits that COVID has forced our government into the past year. The current mobility of many workers I think can be attributed to this, thus stimulating job creation and more competitiveness for companies to make better job offerings. We've seen how companies have behaved in this environment -- lots of layoffs, furloughs and outright job cuts.
Mind you, I don't think all companies are evil or some such. Rather, business incentives in the USA are rarely aligned with the economic benefits of the places they ply their trades/services.
Just as an example, I live in a city that has an Amazon warehouse. It's freaking HUGE!! I think it is 2M sqft. I read somewhere that they paid $40K for the land. My house in a subdivision has a land value of $41K according to my tax assessment.
> And the facts too often do not support it. States and localities spend about $95 billion annually wooing corporations with tax incentive deals, and most of the evidence shows that they receive little for it in terms of real economic benefits. The loser is the public, whose tax dollars could otherwise be spent on public services that provide something of value.
There’s another loser: the companies/entrepreneurs that do not get these tax benefits and are disadvantaged in the market.
Hmm. Tax insensitive dollars are not spent. These are hypothetical dollars not received from a factory that might have been built.
A thought experiment: let's suppose that the corporate tax in your state is exactly 0%. A corporation still employs a lot of people in your state, and these people pay taxes. Having them unemployed or working at jobs that paid less would be a loss for the state tax income.
Tangential and largely unrelated, but a long time ago, I worked for a startup that got bought out by a megacorporation. The startup didn't really make us sign any NDAs or non-competes, so most of the people there had a fairly active github profile.
The transition was fairly smooth, but the megacorporation wanted us to sign NDAs, which most of the engineers did, but I made the mistake of actually reading it, and realizing that they kind of stuck an extremely vague non-compete in there. I didn't sign it.
I was at that company for a whole year longer, every week getting a "reminder" email to sign the NDA, which I never did.
I'm not a jerk, I didn't disclose any company secrets or release their code, but I doubt I was the only person who found that little "we don't feel like firing you" loophole, and the others might have been a little less nice than me.
This would not be (so much of) a problem if there was a statutory obligation on public officials to perform their duties and as part of that share certain information with the public. That would override any NDA seeking to circumvent it.
Oh wait... there is (at least in the UK - not so sure about the US but I imagine there are similar laws there). Hmm.
I've been led to believe (through my own corporate lawyer) that NDAs are pretty much useless unless they come with a penalty clause. AFAIK here in Germany the maximum penalty is something like 20k EUR. So at the end of the day, they do seem to be pretty much useless, at least in Germany. I think they are something one can forgo altogether, for all intents and purposes. Sure, it is annoying if someone takes a concept from a presentation and creates their own startup, claiming it to be their own invention or such, but that's bound to happen one way or another given the vast diversity of personality types out there. Bottom line is I think it would be beneficial to everyone to abolish this nonsense altogether.
Wow this is a pretty dark abuse of NDAs. Where is the oversite on legal misuse like this? It's technically legal but clearly against the spirit of local governance.
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