Ontario's corporate job-creation subsidies may not create jobs, economists warn

On a Friday morning in December, 2013, Kathleen Wynne arrived at Cisco Canada’s Bay Street offices with an early Christmas gift.

The Ontario government would give the technology giant $220-million. In exchange, Cisco – which posted $7.9-billion in profits last year – would hire up to 1,700 more people in the province.

“My vision for Ontario is that it’s a place where government makes smart, forward-looking investments,” the beaming Premier told assembled reporters. “This is the largest job-creating investment that we’ve seen in our technology sector.”

America’s Business Elites Admit They’d Rather Hire Robots Than People

Corporate boards lavish them with massive pay packages and politicians venerate them as “job creators.” But it turns out that America’s business chieftains would rather not create full-time jobs to do what needs doing if they can possibly avoid it, according to the latest annual survey from the Harvard Business School (HBS).

America's 'Job Creators' Would Rather Do Anything But Create Jobs: Survey

hereAmerica's capitalists take every chance they get to remind us that they are our "job creators," but it turns out that their least-favorite thing on earth to do is create jobs.

South Carolina Primary 2012: In Rural County, Long Wait For Job Creators

BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. -- It's been more than two years since Frederick Parker had a decent full-time job.

Standing outside the state workforce office as he waits for a ride, the 40-year-old South Carolina native opens up a backpack filled with evidence of his long struggle with unemployment: a stack of updated résumés, some fruitless job leads and certificates from continuing-education courses he's completed at the local tech college. A construction worker by trade, Parker has racked up certificates to run a backhoe, a bulldozer, a front-end loader and an excavator.

Even so, all he managed to land was a part-time stint at a local McDonald's.

"I have everything I should need, and I'm still applying," says Parker, who's wearing a pressed burgundy button-down shirt, his chest-length dreadlocks pulled back neatly in a ponytail, so any potential employer would "know I mean business."

"I work hard," he goes on. "My paperwork's clean. I have a high school diploma, a résumé. I've got no criminal record."

Parker may be a victim of geography more than anything else. He lives in South Carolina's Marlboro County, a mostly rural region surrounding the town of Bennettsville and hugging the North Carolina border. The county is battling a wince-inducing unemployment rate of roughly 16 percent, or nearly double the national rate. During the worst days of the Great Recession, it climbed to an eye-popping 21 percent.

In short, this part of South Carolina isn't anything like Iowa or New Hampshire, the two previous presidential nomination stops, both of which have been far more insulated from the jobs crisis. Globalization has not been kind to the I-95 corridor in South Carolina, and jobs can be hard to find even in a healthy economy. Although few of the candidates are likely to do more than drive through or fly over Democratic-leaning, mostly African-American Marlboro County, it is in many ways an actualized vision of the GOP platform, a free-market fever dream of low taxes, cheap and abundant labor, little union presence and even less regulatory burden.