For $459,000 per job created in three high-profile cases, the subsidy program seems a very high price to pay, especially with tax dollars.

This op-ed by NJPP president Deborah Howlett ran in the Sunday, November 27 edition of the Star-Ledger.

Over the past two years, the state has approved more than $1.2 billion in tax subsidies for corporations and developers, all in the name of economic development.

These tax breaks have gone to some of the most iconic business names in New Jersey, among them Campbell’s Soup, Prudential, Goya, ShopRite and Panasonic. They are a key component of a strategy by the administration — and facilitated by the Legislature — to invest public resources in private enterprise with the hope of creating more jobs.

It’s a flawed strategy, however.

It is predicated on the idea that if a private enterprise just had more money, it would hire more workers. But, as most economists agree, the private sector nationwide is sitting on mountains of capital and these large corporations have access to financing at bargain-basement interest rates.

New Jersey is a case in point. Many of the tax subsidies are being used to assist in the construction or refurbishing of work space, which may well have happened without the state’s assistance.

Take three of the Urban Transit Hub tax credits as examples: Goya is getting $82 million to relocate its factory to Jersey City. Campbell’s Soup is getting $34 million to renovate its Camden headquarters. Panasonic will receive $102 million to move — from Secaucus — into new offices in Newark.

Those three awards, combined, represent a public investment of $218 million. The return on that investment, according to the Economic Development Authority’s numbers, will be 475 jobs. That’s a cost of $459,000 per job created. Even spread over 10 years, it seems a very high price to pay, especially with tax dollars.

The rate at which all the corporate tax subsidies are being awarded is staggering. When New Jersey Policy Perspective first totaled them all up in its April report, “A Surge in Subsidies,” the amount was a whopping $822 million. That’s roughly the same amount of public school aid the state cut from the 2010 budget.

In the six months since, that total has nearly doubled, if you include the $350 million promised but not yet awarded to the developers who are resurrecting the shopping mall formerly known as Xanadu.

The state has argued that these strategies are having an effect, pointing to the creation of 51,000 private sector jobs. While it’s true jobs were created, they were offset by nearly identical job losses in construction, manufacturing and the public sector.

In fact, as NJPP noted last week in its report, “The State of Working New Jersey 2011: The Lost Decade,” only eight other states had a worse job-creation record last year than did New Jersey.

There is a better strategy to create jobs using scarce public resources. The state ought to be investing public funds in its people, not its corporations. It ought to be using tax money to finance projects that benefit the public and private enterprise.

For example, fully funding education would not only put thousands of teachers back to work, it also would maintain the standard of excellence New Jersey has established in its system of public education. And a teacher’s paycheck spends the same as Panasonic worker’s paycheck, especially when both are financed by tax dollars.

And if the state has the wherewithal to finance the construction of a casino, as it did this year with a $261 million Economic Redevelopment and Growth grant to the developers of the Revel casino in Atlantic City, why can’t it use other available resources to build schools?

The School Development Authority has $3.9 billion in untapped bonding capacity. There’s not so much difference in the state using that borrowing authority to build a school than there is in the state tapping 20 years of future tax revenues to finance the construction of a casino. Certainly, building schools would put just as many trade laborers to work and create just as many jobs for teachers as building casinos would add workers. But the school construction would benefit the public by replacing schools in the state that have been deemed unfit for students and boarded up.

This is not just about investing in schools and teachers. There are dozens of other such opportunities for public investment — green energy, road and bridge repairs, transit — that will allow the state to directly create jobs, in both the public and private sectors.

Any of those options would seem to be a better strategy than throwing money at corporations and hoping for good results.