This reminds me of something that came up when I lived near a city with a bunch of large gaming companies. When making the case for how the gaming industry benefited the local economy (and therefore should be given more incentives), they reported an average salary of ~$80,000 to make it sound like they were bringing in a bunch of high-paid jobs. In fact, most workers made $30,000-$40,000, and it was mainly the salary of a few high-paid executives that raised the average to nearly double that. Now, anyone who has even the most basic grasp of statistics could have told you that using the median rather than the average would have more accurately reflected the salary that most workers received, but a lot of people don't know anything about statistics, or it doesn't occur to them to apply that knowledge in real-world situations, or they just don't care, etc., and so the industry's assertions went largely unchallenged.
My point is this: stating that the tax breaks increase salaries is exactly the sort of verbal wrangling that these companies would use to argue in favor of them. Pointing out that they're used to pad profits and likely don't have any effect on the vast majority of workers' salaries makes it harder for a politician who voted for them to justify it to the taxpayers, especially since the companies are already there and thus have less grounding for the usual go-to argument for corporate welfare (i.e. that it will attract employers in the first place).
Nah, its irrelevant semantics. If the tax break goes away Ubisoft suddenly sees their employee salries paid out all increase by 60% just to maintain parity. What might-have-happened to their pay beforehand is entirely irrelevant, what matters is what does happen.
No, Spectacle's right. There's a substantive difference between saying that employees are receiving 60% more due the tax breaks and saying that the company would have to pay employees 60% more without them. The former implies that the employees would receive less without the tax breaks because the company wouldn't be willing/able to pay more, whereas the latter states the opposite.
And even if it were just semantics, it certainly wouldn't be irrelevant. Language makes a huge difference in how we think about things; there's a reason that think tanks spend absurd amounts of money sussing out exactly which words and phrases people will respond to. To quote the guy who was largely responsible for popularizing phrases like "entitlements", "climate change", and "death tax":
Look, for years, political people and lawyers... used the phrase "estate tax." And for years they couldn't eliminate it. The public wouldn't support it because the word "estate" sounds wealthy. Someone like me comes around and realizes that it's not an estate tax, it's a death tax, because you're taxed at death. And suddenly something that isn't viable achieves the support of 75 percent of the American people. It's the same tax, but nobody really knows what an estate is. But they certainly know what it means to be taxed when you die.
