Busted

Things are gonna get a whole lot worse before they get better, Louisiana. 

Nucor Corp. appears to have moved on from its plans for a multi-phase $3.4 billion steelmaking complex in St. James Parish.

The company’s fourth-quarter earnings report includes writing off $84.1 million spent on engineering and equipment related to a blast furnace project that “will not be utilized in the future at our St. James Parish, Louisiana site.”

Nucor made the decision on the blast furnace during the fourth quarter, the company said.

Nucor has already built the first phase of the project: a $750 million, direct reduced iron plant at St. James that employs 170 people.

In the short term, though, maybe we're making fiscal progress?

The state had promised the company $160 million in incentives if all the phases were built. In order to collect, Nucor had to provide its final investment decision to Louisiana Economic Development by the end of 2015.

It's hard to tell because the "dynamic scoring" of the budgetary impact of these incentives is so much politically loaded bullshit. According to the models favored by LABI et al, it's always good to give all of our money away to "job creators." Still, $160 million in corporate welfare that won't happen now has to help a little bit, maybe. 

On the other hand, so much for "Qatar on the Bayou"