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Edward Jones, the large St. Louis-based brokerage house, has announced a $260 million expansion to one of its local campuses. It will add “up to” 1,000 jobs to the local economy over the next few years. That’s great news, right! Right?

Well, let’s break down exactly how much the municipality of Maryland Heights, the county of St. Louis, and the state of Missouri are paying for those 1,000 jobs. First, the state. It will kick in $7 million dollars worth of tax credits in the form of revenue bonds and $4 million of job incentives. So, the state is paying $11 million for those jobs.

The county is kicking in an additional $30.5 million in tax abatements and reimbursing the company $8 million dollars for sales tax collected on the building products. So, the county is paying $38.5 million for these jobs. That’s a total of $49.5 million in direct job aid to the company.

On top of that, the city, state, and county have agreed to improve the intersection closest to the company’s buildings at a cost of $30 million. So, that brings the total tab to $79.5 million.

Why do I have a problem with this? Aren’t more jobs a good thing? Yes, they are. But Edward Jones isn’t going anywhere. They’re headquarted here and it would take a hell of a lot more money than they are paying now to rebuild the campus they have in Maryland Heights. This is money that is essentially wasted on “saving” jobs that weren’t going to go anywhere anyway.

Meanwhile, Missouri has had to completely dismantle Medicaid (I’m not kidding, as of 2008 it’s gone, but they’ll have an idea by then, they promise!) because of budget cuts. They can’t fund education because of budget cuts. We have the second worst roads in the country because we can’t afford to repair them.

But we can give a private company $80 million to do something they were going to do anyway.