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>> Per the report, the package of tax breaks and incentives was achieved through local officials bound by nondisclosure agreements, quietly struck legislative deals, and parliamentary sleight of hand to avoid public scrutiny of the deal.
>> So the residents of Richland Parish did not have much of a heads-up on what was coming.
No voting, no public interests, only closed-door politics.
From an interview[1] given by the author: "I think the next most important reason they distrusted the federal government is their experience with protective agencies in the state of Louisiana, and they thought, “Gosh, these are a lot of people we pay taxes to but they don't really protect us.” And they’re right, because Louisiana is an oil state - that was a big discovery for me - and it outsources, in a way, the moral dirty work to the state. So, the state actually pretends to protect the citizenry from hazardous waste and pollution of air and water and ground, but it doesn't actually protect it very much. It gives out permits, as one Tea Party person said "like candy." And so, they felt the federal government is just a bigger, badder version of a state government which isn't protecting us. So, they'd had bad experience. They’d been burned, and I think that's the second kind of source of resistance to the government. But the third is that they saw the government as an instrument of what I'll call “the line cutters.”"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strangers_in_Their_Own_Land [1] https://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=18-P13-000...
> No voting, no public interests, only closed-door politics.
This is exactly what NIMBYs say about attempts to build housing; and resisting efforts on the part of local people to exercise political pressure against proposed housing development projects is a core component of YIMBYist activism. If it's possible for local activists to be short-sighted, self-interested, or straightforwardly wrong when they exert political pressure against housing developments, then it's also possible for them to be similarly wrong about data centers, or any other built structure that someone, somewhere has a problem with.
If a real estate developer already owns land and wants to build at their expense on their own land, quite a few people think that, in general, they should be permitted to do so as long as they comply with applicable laws.
But this set of tax breaks is modifying the effect of the applicable laws (namely sales and use tax, according to the article) for the benefit of a landowner. That seems rather different.
Incidentally, that same $3.3 billion could build around 10,000 accessory dwellings in Baton Rouge.
There's a huge difference between extremely publically pushing for laws that allow buildings to be built vs private negotiating tax breaks that only affect a singular building.
*And I hated Ronald Reagan at the time
Now bring me some downvotes to show me the error of my ways... Thank you for restoring my lack of faith in humanity...
The US needs to do something about lobbying. It seems too late already, but maybe you can get things to improve a bit.
If states all worked together, they could plausibly prevent this race to the bottom by agreeing on a universal sales tax minimum, but there are many obstacles to that as well besides some vague sense of "lobbying". You'd want all states to work cooperate on their minimum tax, but every state has a big incentive to break from the cartel and offer lower taxes in exchange for getting all the datacenters built there. There are lobbyists who are working against this, but it's not just meta and google, it's also local utility companies and construction/trade unions (who all want their state to defect and be the one to get all the new money and jobs)
The states, under Trump, are all working together to ensure a race to the bottom happens, both in the U.S. and abroad.
One hundred and thirty five nations worked together to create a minimum corporate tax rate called "Pillar Two". It would have factored in tax breaks for projects like this by calculating an effective tax rate for Meta, and mandated higher taxes if the effective rate was too low. Trump withdrew the U.S. from that effort and created a framework to retaliate if other countries upheld Pillar Two to raise taxes on American megacorps[1] in their jurisdictions.
____
[1]https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/2025/how-us-mu...
Neoliberalism is a blight upon the world and it has only been around for 50ish years or so. It doesn't have to be this way.
It's more likely to impose them.
But I don't see what other options are available for states to compete with each other if not through tax breaks.
Edit: I suppose if you ban tax breaks, if a state wants to be competitive, they still can but through modifying the tax code for everyone instead of giving certain people exceptions. That doesn't seem like a terrible alternative..
There's also not "competition" here. It isn't as if data centers have almost any positive local effects, beyond their property tax revenue. They have very few employees and if the property tax is cut they ultimately don't generate any income for the locality.
I can tell you that as someone living in Idaho, I see no differences when I work with the datacenters in Oregon, Washington, or Utah. I'm not benefited in the slightest by the few Idaho datacenters that I interact with currently.
It's the same argument that's been used to give sports stadiums sweetheart deals. These things have almost no local benefits and a lot of negative side effects with their presence.
They should compete based on actual policy including tax policy. "Tax breaks" for specific projects are just unfair and a quick race to the bottom. Instead, areas should be required to treat all entities equally. Even tax breaks for specific industries like tv/film production are unfair but at least industry wide tax breaks treat individual entities more fairly.
If a state's taxes are too high to attract investment, then they should have to lower taxes for everyone (of the same type).
> exempt from state and local sales and use taxes on its data center equipment for the next 20 years
That said, the real issue IMO is that "use taxes" are just absurd to start with. Why should a random city/town be taxing products neither made nor sold in their jurisdiction. If anything, the sale of the datacenter product/services should be taxed but the external inputs "imported" from other states or countries is crazy to tax.
Again, I will die on the hill that a land value tax makes this all very simple. A LVT is the perfect strategy for extracting public value from data centers since electricity & water availability is a major input to a lands value.
Federal ban on tax breaks for companies over a certain market cap?
Why can't they compete on "we have a good regulatory setup" or "we have good schools for your employees" or "we are a nice place to live"? Why compete on "we'll soak or own taxpayers more than the next state over so you can make even more obscene profits"?
data centers could be a great thing for helping with the duck curve and the like, if they can throttle up and down based on energy cost
It's not really a conspiracy, perhaps more a delusion.
Anti growth environmentalism is so toxic when we could just be pursuing wide spread clean energy and growth.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48123090
> They are basically the best customers of the grid possible - consistent high usage.
The grid exists to serve the populace. It's why we tend to call it a "public utility".
https://spectrum.ieee.org/5gw-data-center
They averaged 7 crashes a month near the site at the time of this article. The community isn’t even 2000 people. They’d had 1 fatality already by the time this article was written as well.
It’s so dangerous the local school has shut down their playground despite being a mile away. If kids being unable to have a basic outdoor recess isn’t enough to make you care I don’t know what will.
https://lailluminator.com/2025/11/22/meta-data-center-crashe...
Like, the problem was always the asymmetry. Can FB police everything? Probably not. Should they be able to operate at scale if they can't? Unclear. Section 230 blah blah platform not responsible for things users post
But YOU sure get banned. At any time for any reason. When you then "report" (that button does... what, exactly?) an actual problem, platform happily tells you no community standards were violated.
You might even get banned for something you were forced to do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24776748 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306)
See, this is why shit like holding his feet to the fire for Dumb Fucks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 matters. I don't care if he was young, he also hacked Crimson reporters. Because what he ('he', assuming he didn't just steal it from the Winklevosses) built early on has evolved into a platform that is many things and fucking broken (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712) on top of that
I do hate it though, Mark has meaningful funding to build some actually useful AI, hell if he started bottom up, he can have his anime waifu he wants.
feels like short term job creation program at best.
You're usually better off landing a new Target.
Does any construction project go on forever?
It’s just a building. Come on.
It is, however, in the Mississippi River delta... so I wouldn't put flooding out of the picture.