They didn't get the tax breaks because they didn't meet the targets.
From your article:
After Foxconn failed to meet its job creation targets, Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, last month pulled a deal that would have handed the company nearly $4.5bn in incentives for completing its plans.
Hundreds of millions were spent on variously infra improvements, eminent-domaining people out of the way, lawyers, etc.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/lake-county-news-sun/...
I actually don't know how much Foxconn did get out of it. They've apparently run similar scams elsewhere, it appears to be a Foxconn side gig.
There's a fun book in here for a scrappy investigative journalist.
That said, yeah, I also have to be honest. We're down about 1 billion dollars on that Foxconn thing. That's what we're out of pocket. The new governor, wisely, took what remained of our chips and left that table. You get mad, but you just have to chalk it up to a learning experience.
The Illinois people are right on this one by the way. Not even in Illinois would their leaders get away with a 5.5 billion dollar con. The people in Illinois are so used to dealing with corruption that they would have started asking questions and raising a fuss long before it got to that point. Our problem is that we're so accustomed to our corruption that we never raised a fuss until it was way too late.
All that said, in Wisconsin our leaders didn't get away with 5.5 billion dollar con either technically speaking. Scott Walker and his boys got us for about a billion, but they didn't get as much as they wanted. So fibs shouldn't gloat too much, because while I can't see anyone in Illinois getting away with a 5.5 billion dollar pure con, I could see someone getting away with maybe a billion. (It's just that they're far more wealthy than we are, so that billion doesn't hurt as much.)
Everyone knew from the start this was a BS deal and never going to happen or make ANY sense. This was pure incompetence at a political level that was paid for by tax payers.
This is potentially wasted money, but it did not go to Foxconn, and presumably created infrastructure jobs. Not defending the deal, but it is often mischaracterized. The benefits to the companies usually are tax rebates that are only valuable if the company makes real investments that are taxable. They are not direct payments.
> and presumably created infrastructure jobs
Usually you hear people complain about dig-a-hole-then-fill-it-up jobs. But if we're going to start supporting those, it would be best not to tie them to scams, I think.
Yeah. Sounds a lot like the dig-up-all-the-carbon-burn-then-bury-it-again civilizational project going on the past 100, and next 100 years.
What exactly was the purpose to "re-arranging small bits of matter near the surface of the earth" again? [1]
Basically I wanted to make a comment about greedy exploitation-exploration trade-off strategies here but will stop short at this kind of eliptical passing remark.
[1] paraphrasing Russell in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Praise_of_Idleness_and_Othe... it is appropriate given current moment
From the same man that proposed the idea of "re-arranging small bits of matter near the surface of the earth".
>It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing.
It's a social hack to get around idiotic situations. It's like moving to mars because you are worried about a nuclear war or climate change. Dumb games require dumb players.
If Foxconn tricked a local government into providing free "useful" infrastructure it could just rent that "useful" infrastructure out to a different company and thus capture the entire tax benefit. However, they didn't even do that... The money was fully wasted.
On top of everything else, abuses of eminent-domain, civil forfeiture, and so forth really, really bother me.
In principle, I unconditionally support the right of the polis (the government) to do what needs to be done. My own city basically used extralegal means to wrestle numerous blighted, condemned properties away from a trust. The creators of the trust were dead and no one was left to negotiate.
But hot damn these levers of power get abused.
Please recommend any books, articles, etc advocating reforms.
Ilya Somin is a law professor who writes a lot on ED-reform.
As far as action, the Institute for Justice looks for cases they think they can make with, and lobby for legal reform.
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/eminent-domain/
You'll find they both come at things from a libertarian direction, but neither are rabid.
A lot of the reporting at the time emphasized that Foxconn had a history of doing this in other countries. It seems like a negotiating tactic that evolved in an age of cynical political environments where everyone's proximate goal is to announce a 'deal' with the full expectation that they won't be in a position to take credit (or blame) for the quality of that deal.
What would have happened if this deal had been done in China?
No one would have reported on the failure. The local jobs numbers would have "jumped." Infrastructure would have been "built." Everyone would have gotten a pat on the back and/or promotion for hitting their economic targets.
The weakness of command-style political systems have always been that they incentize systemic lying.
The takeaway is that either (a) everyone who touched the Wisconsin project is an idiot, but an outlier in the company, or (b) the failure to execute in Wisconsin is indicative of the general state of the company.
(a) seems like a stretch, given the project's size and visibility. Ergo, (b).
A $1bn increase in revenue would be less than a 1% increase for Foxconn overall. That suggests they're probably willing to bear extremely high costs to establish new sites, as long as those sites will eventually yield significant revenue. Their negotiating tactics here seem short sighted from my point of view, but when you're as large as they are you create your own conditions.
Edit: Like...this deal seems to allow them to operate any of their businesses in Wisconsin. If they decide not to, they burn bridges in Wisconsin, but they wouldn't care about burning those bridges because burning them means they don't want to do business in the state. It seems like all they lose is their negotiators' salaries, small (for them) facilities costs, and whatever general goodwill they lose.
Hope that the Governor of Wisconsin stayed a Republican? Now, that's not to say Democrats can't engage in grift, but, the deal was started under a Republican Governor in a notoriously corrupt state where the promise of Foxconn jobs was lauded by legislators, the governor, and the former President as a win for the people of the state, for our country, and a blow to China (that we were taking jobs back).
Foxconn's incentives seemed aligned with promising the moon and if those people were reelected, well, wouldn't compensating Foxconn for those promises and their outcome (the election outcome, not the factories) be fair?
Had those politicians stayed in office, it's possible they would reward Foxconn for participating in the charade that helped them obtain reelection. Is it certain? No, I won't say it is.
But, what else was Foxconn's goal if not to actually realize those incentives without having to make the investment to justify them? They knew they were promised an enormous incentive by the state, and they knew that they would not fulfill their end of the bargain. If they also knew that they wouldn't realize those incentives, why did they pursue them? The simplest answer is that they fully intended to realize them.
Surely at least some of the negotiators of that deal legitimately believed that the other party - the Republican Governor and majority legislature in the state - would play ball?
Many people's gut reaction to a whiff of partisanship here or suggestion of corruption or conspiracy is to push back hard. Well, dammit, what did Foxconn want to get out of it except for billions of dollars in ill-gotten tax incentives?
I'm responding so incredulously to you because everyone's motivations here was advertised loudly. It's not a conspiracy if it happens in broad daylight.
It seems clear to me that they wanted to not have to pay taxes in Wisconsin for many, many years to come.
https://apnews.com/article/technology-wisconsin-d3f025e43ab0...