Really, building a high-tech plant in the middle of a desert where it’s been over 110 deg F for at least 21 days straight, and where fewer than half of Arizona high school graduates went on to college?
The hottest day of the year in Phoenix, AZ happened Wednesday when the temperature reached 119 degrees at 2:42 p.m., according to the National Weather Service. Who the heck would want to live in this inferno of a place – certainly not highly educated people. And educated people are needed to make a successful chip factory.
Chip makers build plants in the state because of few regulations and many tax breaks. But some of the tax breaks have rankled Arizona residents, who say the moves have hurt funding for public schools. The state ranks 47th in per-student spending. “Corporations are choosing not to settle in Arizona because of our devastated public education system.” It’s similar to states in the South, who have the country’s worst schools.
And AZ is in a perpetual drought and lacks water. Construction has halted on projects because of the water shortage. A factory or “fab” for making semiconductors needs a lot of water to operate. It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates, using the water to cool down equipment and clean silicon wafers. Republican Governor Doug Ducey helped make this mess. Deregulation and tax breaks are great for the wealthy and corporations, not for the people.
Don’t you just love how the wealthy and the rich corporations play one state off of another? Plutocrats, such as Musk and Bezos, find the states that will give them money and tax breaks, no regulations so that they can pollute the area, pay workers substandard wages, treat their workers in harmful ways in their factories, and abuse the infrastructure that’s present and not create new, needed infrastructure. And even worse, the US government supports these regressive states by giving them tax dollars to build these substandard, polluting factories, using the money mostly derived through tax dollars from the extremely wealthy states of California and New York. In the fiscal year of 2022, the state of California collected a total of 280.83 billion U.S. dollars in tax revenue, the highest of any state. New York collected the second highest amount of taxes in that year, coming in at 117.98 billion U.S. dollars. And the money we paid-in is being used to abuse the people and the environment in red states. The states that protect their environment, build infrastructure such as the world’s greatest public university system, and protect their workers, and give the most money to the system, receive little in return from the US. We do it on our own, and California is booming despite having to support the rest of the US.
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 