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Comment by notional | Hacker News Reader

That worked out great for Wisconsin residents recently

For every one deal that went sour, there are hundreds of successes.

Additionally, comparing a rushed Foxconn plant to a Samsung fab facility, in an area where Samsung already has roots, is dishonest to say the least.

Source? How does one even begin to measure the opportunity costs of pitting politicians with short term incentives against each other? Many of the supposed benefits aren’t even able to be calculated.

The source is the hundreds of large corporations that have came to a remote location away the already larger and established metro areas with international airports nearby, so your usual suspects of LA, SF, NYC and ATL.

There almost always is some incentive package to attract the businesses. My city, Charlotte, has 10 examples alone. Neighboring Charleston and Columbia in SC have quite a few examples of theirs, namely in Aerospace and Auto Manufacturing.

How can one figure out if they would not have come anyway due to lower wages/land prices?

What benefits? Every fab becomes an ecological disaster over time. They should be assessed penalty rates not given discount rates to cover the future cost of cleanup.

Wisconsin's tax break was conditional on Foxconn meeting key hiring/production metrics. Foxconn had a long trail of failures building viable manufacturing business outside China where the CCP provided everything from free land, to free buildings, to unlimited supply of young, obedient, unskilled labor pool for rural China.

Samsung on the other hand has been in Austin, Texas for almost two decades, investing well over $15+B so far.

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