When General Motors announced that it was idling five plants in the United States and Canada recently, there was shock in two American cities.

One was Warren, Ohio, where GM builds the Chevrolet Cruze at its Lordstown assembly plant. Folks in the industrial heartland are no strangers to this kind of betrayal. But after forking over $60 million in state and local incentives in the last decade, they believed they had done enough to get GM to maintain Lordstown, which has built 16.3 million vehicles since 1966.

The other shocked town was Washington, D.C., where President Trump learned that thousands of the manufacturing jobs he had promised — a promise that had helped him win the state of Ohio in 2016 — were being killed. Mr. Trump reminded GM’s chief executive, Mary Barra, that the federal government had propped up the company to the tune of $50 billion in loans and other assistance during the Great Recession. He told her to shut a factory in China and move the work to Ohio.

Ms. Barra made it clear that GM has to operate on behalf of GM shareholders, not Mr. Trump. The company has excess manufacturing capacity — sales of sedans like the Cruze and the Impala are falling — and it has to invest in autonomous cars and other technologies. Somewhere else.

Federal, state and local governments have gotten into the habit of providing corporations with incentives to move, incentives to stay, bailouts to stave off failure and tax benefits to build on success and create more jobs. All are based on promises about job creation and economic development that more often than not prove hollow.

The Republicans promised that last year’s tax cut would prompt investment that creates jobs — GM got a $157 million tax bonus through its third quarter — but corporations have also used that money to cover the expenses of closing plants. (So far this year, companies in the United States have cut about a half million jobs, 28 percent more than at the same time last year.)

Corporate incentives tripled between 1990 and 2015, according to the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. The trend seemed to slow a bit after that, but then Nevada changed the game, plunking down $1 billion for Tesla’s battery plant. Wisconsin topped it with a $4 billion offer for a Foxconn plant. This year Virginia and New York rang up $6 billion for Amazon’s benefit. “There is now a new normal,” says Amy Liu, vice president and director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings Institution, “among Tesla, Foxconn and Amazon, we are breaking the billion dollar bank for the first time.”

By paying incentives, governors, mayors and other politicians feel they’re “winning” jobs from competitors. As New York City mayor, Bill DeBlasio, put it, at the end of the day, 25,000 jobs are going somewhere. Why shouldn’t the city have them?

The Foxconn deal might hold part of the answer to that question. Foxconn, an Apple components supplier, plans to build an electronics plant south of Milwaukee that would employ 13,000 people. But its incentive agreement works out to an astonishing $230,000 per job, which defies a reasonable return on investment.

— New York Times