Photo credit: Robert Geiger
Absolutely no one should have been surprised that the fantasy of an imaginary high-tech Foxconn factory three times the size of the Pentagon and transforming Wisconsin into a jobs-gushing Silicon Valley of the Midwest suddenly began vanishing into thin air last week. The only surprising part was that the deal started coming apart even before Foxconn—a Taiwanese company producing liquid-crystal display TV and computer screens—could collect any of the $4 billion in state and local taxpayer subsidies former Republican Gov. Scott Walker foolishly committed to pay the company throughout the next 15 years—the largest state tax giveaway in U.S. history.
Seriously, did anyone other than Walker’s Republican co-conspirators in the Legislature ever really believe all those preposterous claims about Foxconn turning Racine County into Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland, with Tinkerbell flying overhead sprinkling fairy dust? The initial announcement was a 2017 Walker re-election stunt at the White House featuring Walker, Donald Trump and Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou—three notorious public liars well-known for promising enormous jobs numbers that never materialized.
The centerpiece of Walker 2010 campaign was an incredible political promise to create 250,000 jobs in his first term, which he still hadn’t achieved when voters finally sent him packing eight years later. Trump’s blizzard of well-documented lies by The Washington Post increased to 15-a-day in 2018, tripling his 2017 world record. It wasn’t easy, but Gou put them both to shame. Gou had broken promises to spend billions of dollars throughout the world that, he claimed, would create tens of thousands of jobs in Brazil, India, Vietnam and Indonesia. Gou’s only prior U.S. fabrication was a 2013 promise to invest $30 million creating 300 high-tech jobs in Pennsylvania. It never happened.
The Lies Live On
Walker’s gone now, but his fraudulent claims about Foxconn live on. When Gou’s assistant said last week that Foxconn was ready to abandon manufacturing plans in Wisconsin (“In terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S. We can’t compete.”), the media widely reported Wisconsin could lose a $10 billion manufacturing facility providing 13,000 jobs. That wasn’t true. Foxconn was contractually obligated to provide only 3,000 jobs. After Walker publicly inflated the number to 13,000, Foxconn adopted the same exaggeration, vaguely suggesting the factory might someday provide “up to 13,000 jobs.”
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It’s obvious why Walker avoided mentioning the actual number of 3,000 guaranteed jobs. The real number revealed how ridiculous Wisconsin’s $4 billion taxpayer subsidy to Foxconn really was. Wisconsin was paying $4 billion to Foxconn for 3,000 jobs, while New York, Virginia and Tennessee combined were paying $2.4 billion in state subsidies to Amazon for 55,000 much higher-paying jobs.
The disappearance of the Foxconn deal could be the best possible outcome for Wisconsin. Even if everything went as planned, the non-partisan state Legislative Fiscal Bureau predicted Wisconsin wouldn’t recover financially from the Foxconn agreement for a quarter century. Until then, health care, education, roads and every other public need would be underfunded to export billions of Wisconsin dollars to a Taiwanese billionaire.
So what’s really going on with Foxconn? Is Foxconn going to build a manufacturing plant in Wisconsin or not? If it does, how many jobs will it provide? It’s hard to know when everybody involved in the project has a history of lying, but there are a few simple rules to follow sorting through the outpouring of conflicting public statements.
Don’t Believe the Tweets!
The most important thing we’ve all learned is never to believe anything tweeted by the president. When Trump tweeted: “Great news on Foxconn in Wisconsin after my conversation with Terry Gou!” we can be pretty sure it’s not great news for Wisconsin. Neither can we believe Republican legislators who greased the fast track for the Foxconn train wreck. When the deal started blowing up, the first people they blamed were newly elected Democrats who had absolutely nothing to do with the Republican negotiations.
All we really know so far is that Gou failed to meet his initial 2018 job goals to earn a penny of the $4 billion bonanza Walker was so eager to throw at him. Apparently, the company’s future plans change hourly. But, we definitely shouldn’t believe anything the company says about jobs numbers. Gou has told investors he plans to replace 80% of his worldwide workforce with robots during the next decade. So disregard everything the liars say. We really won’t know what’s happening until it does—or doesn’t—actually happen.
But, the Wisconsin deal will always be held up nationally as the worst tax giveaway of all time in U.S. history. The state loses either way, whether it succeeds in transferring an enormous chunk of its tax revenue to Taiwan or the deal continues to fall apart. Walker probably should reconsider the idea he floated a few weeks ago about running for public office again someday. Heck, he might even want to reconsider venturing outside his new Downtown digs in Milwaukee without a disguise.
