When two South Korean companies announced a multibillion-dollar investment to build solar panel and electric battery factories in northwest Georgia, federal subsidies helped close a deal to diversify the local economy.
The factories promised thousands of new jobs, transforming the manufacturing base in Cartersville, once a cotton mill town, before an Anheuser-Busch brewery arrived in the 1990s and a tire plant in 2006.
But now Republicans in Congress want to gut the subsidies for projects across the country in a tax cut bill likely days from final passage. President Donald Trump’s signature legislation could harm Cartersville despite it being in overwhelmingly Republican Bartow County, which backed Trump with 75% of the vote all three times he appeared on the ballot.
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