When our state leaders complain that Washington is a welfare magnet (that no-good poor people are flocking here in droves to take advantage of this state's "bountiful" benefits--at best, a few hundred dollars a month), what they don't tell us is that they want to keep it that way--for corporations, of course. The latest handout brewing in Olympia is a series of tax breaks worth at least $100 million to persuade Nucor Corp. of North Carolina to build a steel mill in Longview. Gov. Gary "Don't Expect The Government To Help You" Locke asked the legislature to create the tax breaks to compete with Oregon, which has offered Nucor more than $50 million to put the mill in Coos Bay.

Nucor says the mill will create about 250 jobs in a part of the state suffering from high unemployment. And while steel jobs do pay well, local and state services would take a hit. The bills-- HB2619 and SB6460--would waive all property and sales taxes for Nucor for 15 years, and also give the company tax credits for each local worker hired. The estimated benefit to Nucor is about $6.7 million a year for 15 years, or about $27,000 a year for each job created. Which raises the question: wouldn't it be cheaper to just write $25,000 checks to 250 families in Longview for the 15 years the tax breaks would last? Or use the money to retrain workers, start up small local companies, or employ local people to replant clearcut hillsides devastated by Weyerhaeuser, Georgia Pacific, and other logging companies that have thrived for decades on government largesse?

The Nucor deal should prove once and for all that our "booming economy" is really a mirage. Metropolitan King County can brag about low unemployment. (That's "official" unemployment, of course--forget about all of the people our government doesn't count: homeless people, those who've dropped off the Employment Security rolls, young people just finding their first jobs, temps, housewives looking for work to make ends meet, and the chronically underemployed.) A far larger number of people in the rest of the state are living through a recession, with "official" unemployment levels of 10-12%, while our state legislators are viciously cutting welfare benefits. There really are no jobs for most of these people--because they don't live in Redmond or Issaquah. (And because they don't, they're invisible to the media and to most of our state legislators.)

Even in King County the economy is in a funk. After the pathetic spectacle of Washington's largest and most prosperous county begging voters for help to save Medic One, King County Executive Ron Sims proposed that the county partially subsidize additional Metro bus service for the new Mariners and Seahawks stadiums. You have to wonder what poor counties will cut to underwrite something like the Nucor plant. Maybe costly enforcement of environmental regulations or worker health and safety standards will be the next to go (which in the long run could save Nucor and other companies a bundle of money).

The issue is broader than just the argument over subsidies to Nucor. A few state legislators from both parties have weighed in against the Nucor subsidy, and Nucor could still decide to locate in Coos Bay, Oregon, which is closer to steel markets in California. But if the state legislature passes this bill, it won't matter if Nucor rejects Washington state. Other "qualifying" companies will have the opportunity to operate in a completely tax-free environment on the Olympic Peninsula. Corporate America needn't worry about mythical "tight labor markets," as long as politicians are ready to pit Washington state's economically depressed communities against those in other states.