#Topware two worlds 3 plus#

It’s just rarely as simple as thinking the government is handing foxconn 4 billion dollars.įor example, if a state says Company we exempt you from paying property taxes for 10 years as a value of 1 billion dollars. It’s a crazy equation on if it’s a good deal or not.

#Topware two worlds 3 plus#

Then you consider the plus side of workers and additional tax revenue they bring (income/property/sales…) The other more real costs like roads/infrastructure that would otherwise not need to be built.

But for say Wisconsin, there might not be another company who would pay that much property tax, so it’s not like the state would have 1 billion in property tax revenue otherwise. At worst you can think of in a big city like New York, where property is expensive, sure you can definitely get a more tangible cost of lost revenue… as you could theoretically have that space used by another company who would pay property tax. There’s also incentives which really don’t cost the state much.įor example, if a state says Company we exempt you from paying property taxes for 10 years as a value of 1 billion dollars. Like here Company, we give you 1 billion dollars and you build a plant and employ X workers… The other thing is incentives are complex. In order to get there, Foxconn received special exemptions from environmental rules and regulations, raising concerns about pollution.Īlso, but unrelated, boondoggle is a great word. The jobs supposedly created through this deal would cost the state government over 300,000 dollar per job – which is an absolutely terrible investment. So how did everything go so bad so quickly? He now trails in that re-election bid against a less-than-electric Democratic candidate, the bland state superintendent of public instruction Tony Evers.

Polls now show most Wisconsin voters don’t believe the subsidy will pay off for taxpayers, and Walker didn’t even mention the deal in a November 2017 speech announcing his run for re-election. And instead of a factory of workers building panels for 75-inch TVs, Foxconn executives now say the goal is to build “ecosystem” of buzzwords called “AI 8K+5G” with most of the manufacturing done by robots. Instead of the promised Generation 10.5 plant, Foxconn now says it will build a much smaller Gen 6 plant, which would require one-third of the promised investment, although the company insists it will eventually hit the $10 billion investment target. As the size of the subsidy has steadily increased to a jaw-dropping $4.1 billion, Foxconn has repeatedly changed what it plans to do, raising doubts about the number of jobs it will create.

Fast-forward a few years, and little seems to have come of the deal.īut what seemed so simple on a napkin has turned out to be far more complicated and messy in real life. It was supposed to be a big win for the state of Wisconsin: Foxconn was going to build a massive LCD factory in the state, raking in a massive state subsidy.