There’s a familiar story that plays out at the federal and state level every few years.

A president or a governor announces a plan to bring Industry X to someplace backed by millions or billions in tax credits and subsidies of all sorts. A corporation or two sign up, there’s a press conference, and then the whole thing never goes anywhere. Why doesn’t it go anywhere? Often the financing falls through or the business plan, which might have made sense in 2011 no longer makes sense in 2016 by the time the whole thing is supposed to be ready to go. But often the company is hit with endless regulations and every local groups and official comes down with their hands out and threats if they don’t get what they want out.

Biden’s splashy announcement of a plan to spend billions to build chips in America is laudable in principle, but always going to turn into this kind of mess. And it’s not taking very long for the stick to come out complete with demands that companies jump through a whole bunch of hoops. It’s not hard to guess how this is going to end, with a bunch of wasted money and no more of a domestic chip program than we had before this.

The Biden administration plans to leverage the federal government’s expansive investment in the semiconductor industry to make progress on another goal: affordable child care.

This is how the Left thinks. It’s one reason that it ends up destroying whatever it touches.

You don’t leverage an investment in a product you actually want to do B, C and D. Especially when B, C and D are unrelated social programs and the thing you’ve leveraging doesn’t exist yet.

This is like the scammers who sell shares in something that doesn’t exist yet, for which they don’t have the financing or the rights or anything and which may never come into being.

On Tuesday, the Commerce Department will announce that any semiconductor manufacturer seeking a slice of nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies will need to essentially guarantee affordable, high-quality child care for workers who build or operate a plant.

To be followed by ESG, DEI, BLM, carbon offsets, affinity groups, worker racial quotas, transgender celebrations, abortion clinics, worker representation on boards and every lefty interest group claiming its own pint of blood until nothing is left.

This is how it happens in blue states.

But Mr. Biden did convince lawmakers to approve a range of new spending programs seeking to boost American manufacturing. Now, Commerce is trying to utilize a centerpiece of those efforts, which aims to expand American semiconductor manufacturing, to make at least a small dent in his large goals for the so-called care economy.

When it became clear last year that sweeping plans to expand and subsidize child care would not make it into the climate, health and tax bill that marked the culmination of Mr. Biden’s economic efforts in Congress, Ms. Raimondo gathered aides around a conference table. She told them, she said, that “if Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation” of the bills that did pass.

Trying to piggyback welfare on industry is going to end with neither welfare nor industry.

Anyone who actually has business experience in something other than having your kids sit on the boards of foreign companies to peddle your influence would understand this. And that leaves out Biden.

And by the time there are mandates that the board consist of 50% black transgender Biden administration donors and that 90% of the profits go to Planned Parenthood and that carbon offsets be purchased from companies that Biden donors have a vested interest, everyone but the scammers will have pulled out. The latter will have no experience, but political connections, they’ll raise money based on those connections, and then the whole thing will collapse while China will quietly snicker and buy up their assets, financed by taxpayer money, at cents on the dollar.

This isn’t the first time this has happened.

Republicans should have fought against any such unrelated mandates, but everything played out as usual. Now the outcome will be the same. And then we’ll wonder why we’re losing our industries.