Republican Party’s disastrous Foxconn con finally cleaned up by new Democratic governor

The Wall Street Journal reports that “Foxconn is scaling back plans” of investing $10 billion into the Badger state. How much will they be “scaling back?” Oh, no less than nine-billion, two-hundred-twenty-eight million dollars back. CNN and the WSJ report that the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. and Foxconn had signed a “revised incentive deal outlining a $672 million investment from Foxconn that will create fewer than 1,500 jobs.”

One of the reasons this took so long to happen was that when Gov. Scott Walker was defeated by Democratic challenger Tony Evers in 2018, Foxconn was still trying to pretend that while they weren’t sure what they were going to manufacture, if they were going to manufacture anything at all, they still wanted those billions in Republican tax giveaways, and continued to promise that they could figure out a way to reach the 13,000 employment numbers needed to be met by 2032. Gov. Evers and others put more and more pressure on FoxConn and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to renegotiate the deal—something easily within the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.’s power as Foxconn had already been reneging on the details of the original deal.

The new deal reportedly stipulates that if Foxconn can invest $672 million (that’s a “m” not a “b”) and create 1,454 jobs by 2025, they will qualify for $80 million in incentives. Gov. Evers says this new deal will save Wisconsin taxpayers “a total of $2.77 billion compared to the previous contract, maintain accountability measures requiring job creation to receive incentives, and protect hundreds of millions of dollars in local and state infrastructure investments made in support of the project.” Evers explained that the tax incentives in this new deal match the incentive deals offered to all companies coming to the state.

Senior economist Tim Bartik at the WE Upjohn Institute for Employment Research told CNN that the original deal’s incentive package would have paid out “conservatively” more than $200,000 per job created by Foxconn. “Typically for a new company, incentives are close to $50,000 per job. This new package is close to that.”

But while this news brings back some form of equilibrium to the state, the damage done by Walker and friends’ ill-advised publicity and money grab, remains. The site that was cleared and created for the original deal is reportedly “bigger than Central Park, with nearly 100 homes and small farms bulldozed to make way for Foxconn.”