Wisconsin has negotiated a dramatically scaled-back deal with Foxconn

Most communities tend to prefer having lots of jobs available versus having too few jobs available.

> If the lower taxes are good for creating jobs at net gain to the local economy, then the lower rate should be applied equally among all similarly taxed entities.

I agree with the premise here, but in reality, you can see that won't actually work.

You have existing businesses in an area paying a certain amount in taxes. You want to attract a new major business. If you lower your taxes for all the businesses in hopes of attracting the new business, you just lost a huge chunk of revenue for something that might not come to fruition. Whereas if you don't lower your taxes, that new business has no incentive to go with your locale, and will instead, settle somewhere there is an already established talent-base/infrastructure/etc. Furthering the economic inequality between the regions.

I am not a fan of these tax incentives, but I can't blame these places for using them.

I don't think the comparison to sports stadiums fit here. Usually there is already a stadium for a large NFL team or whatever in the city and the economies in the cities that are large enough to even host these teams are WAY more dynamic than where many factories are being built in the south or midwest.

For example Walmart's HQ was built in a TINY SW Arkansas town. The billions that have been invested there by the company, not only in jobs, but amenities in the city have no comparison to any other option that was available to them. If the city and state wanted to hand Walmart a $100 million dollar check, then that investment would have paid off way more than 10x. (IDK what subsidies they were given, probably none just using this for sake of the argument)

I know WM is the evil empire and I'm not defending all they do, just saying that if the right business moves into your small community it can be worth tens, hundreds or even many billions of dollars to a community that has no other options.

Amazon moving into NYC, or Atlanta giving many millions in subsidies to the Braves for a new stadium? Not really comparable.

We have a coordinating union of states though, we don't need states to be pitted against each other to subsidize existing wealthy owners.

Or, company comes here, pays their employees less than expected, and leaves sooner than expected with the local taxpayers on the hook paying for more infrastructure than they need - and maybe some bonus pollution to deal with for decades.

These deals are always more complicated than the initial marquee numbers and that usually seems to make them less favorable for the area than hoped because companies have greater experience and can play desperate municipalities off against each other with little consequence for not delivering.

According to [1], its:

A) company comes here and pays $0 in tax. and city "took on hundreds of millions in debt that was supposed to be repaid by property taxes".

B) company doesn’t come here and net taxes are still $0. city doesnt take on more debt.

B looks better.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/21507966/foxconn-empty-factories-wi...

And once again the law of the excluded middle strikes. No, the only two options are not the ones you suggest. The other option, that you conveniently ignore, is that cities build a good infrastructure that attracts talent and the businesses come to either serve the talent or employ the talent -- no subsidy needed.

By now there must be entire libraries, or at least large warehouses, filled with case studies from HBS and similar schools that show state and municipal tax incentives are ALWAYS a bad deal for the city and state finances. The only purpose they serve is to make a politician appear effective and to enable that politician and his or her cronies to collect a bit of graft.

> On July 16, 2019, President Trump announced his intent to appoint Walker to be a Member (Private Life) of the Board of Trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution

he was rewarded with a sinecure.

You get taxes in other ways through new building permits, higher property taxes, local sales tax, etc...there is more going on than just collecting corporate taxes in a municipality. The more people you draw the better your overall tax revenue is...and the taxes you are willing to put off are limited in time and generally expire after 5-10 years.

Do you actually believe that? Gov. Walker was notorious for various other corrupt activities as well.

In other terms, grey's law applies here: Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice

Hi friend, thanks for your response. I appreciate the criticism and the opportunity to re-evaluate my point. That said, after thinking about it, I don't believe there's a contradiction in what I've written. Point in fact is that I do not understand--in a personal sense of it "computing" (as you put it) to me--the forces at work that push people to be, as I said, wilfully ignorant of real issues facing the area and planet at large. It's not that I don't understand the people at all and simultaneously attribute ignorance to them, it's that how the ignorance comes to be is a mystery to me. An observer can see an effect without knowing the cause. That's usually how we begin to learn anything. There's a comment adjacent to yours that puts words to a gut feeling about it that takes a big step toward understanding, I think. Discourse is great!

Why is it partisan? Let’s pretend OP said “swing left”. Being against the left isn’t how partisan is normally defined. It’s usually the bias of being for a specific cause/political party. What would be the cause here? Not being pro American politics left? That does not give much info about what causes the person is biased for.

> Unlike other cultures our "rugged individualism" means that we don't tend to derive as much sense of worth from family, traditions, organizations we belong to, etc

I agree with the overall premise, but there is a single notable exception to to this, which is the military, which is the intersection of family, traditions, and government organizations. But even there, as we have seen recently, there is a white nationalism problem afoot.

>Americans classically derive much of their sense of value from:

> 1. Work

> 2. Race (for many white people, especially historically)

> ...

> People will buy anything if you tell them you're selling dignity.

All true, and it's important that politicians who hope to actually heal these folks focus their efforts on restoring the dignity that comes from work and community, and dispel the dangerous sort of "dignity" peddled by ethnic/racial nationalists.

Hard to process this kind of cynicism, accurate though it is. Not your demeanor, by the way, friend, just the reality of it all. Ironic that I speak of willful ignorance and yet am happy to not think too hard about the very things you've called out here.

You're 100% spot on. I cannot be convinced a multi-national mega-corp is ignorant of US labor and the challenges in the US labor market. There just is no way that's possible for a company this size, or am I wrong?

So that leaves either bad faith, or they are just abjectly incompetent. I can't really see any other options. Or, again, am I way off base?

You know what's bad faith? Politicians bullshitting that these kind of factory jobs are ever going to come back.

My smartphone will never be assembled in the US or Germany.

It's not unprecedented that someone who should know better, and has the best advisors in town, is blinded by their preconceptions about a country and its people. It's lost us a few wars.

Nope. The plant that was promised was never built. They did build some storage warehouses and started a propaganda program where they hired dozens to hundreds of locals to come in to the warehouses, sit around, and do nothing to appear like they were doing something.

The machines inside a LCD factory are dramatically more expensive than the building itself. The "plant" has not been built in any meaningful way.

Yes, that does look like the one I was remembering.

Also a Wisconsinite here. I've been involved with the deal and haven't noticed any care about any watershed related things. Most of the business they've attracted so far are companies who want contract manufacturing outside of mainland China. The large "screen factory" is still largely empty, and they have no concrete plans for it, but the side projects which piggybacked on to that plan have seen some success.

> Terry Guo briefly ran for president of the Republic of China.

I have reservations about Foxconn too, but I’m not sure I understand why this bit is relevant. The Republic of China = Taiwan, a US ally. (Mainland China is the People’s Republic of China). This is akin to Bloomberg running for president.

Also it’s Terry Gou and not Guo.

Foxconn is Taiwanese. Wouldn’t Foxconn affiliated people naturally have involvement with Taiwan? Taiwan is our ally. Forget the Middle East for a second. If China was to take TSMC’s factories over. It would be world war 3 most likely.

A web search for 'desalination cost' will easily confirm this for you.

e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00119...

"current [published in 2008] large-scale desalination plants are capable of producing water in the range of $0.50–$2.00/m3"

I got the numbers from Wikipedia.

0.1 cents per liter is cost prohibitive for use cases where water is typically measured by the acre-foot.

I think people understand 30-fold to mean 30x, but don't always intuit that "slashed by 30-fold" is equivalent to a reduction by 97% of the original deal. They especially don't understand that the difference between a 20-fold, 30-fold, and 50-fold reduction is the same as a 95%, 97%, and 98% discount.

This is especially evident in the mental gymnastics required to understand retail sales pricing. How good is a "Buy two, get one 50% off!!" deal? Brains easily give up on the hard questions and substitute easy answers. "What's it actually worth? Bought one at another store last month, do difficult pricing history memory, or easy answer, the original price is listed right there. How good is the deal? Complicated math, or easy answer, it's at least a good enough deal to merit a big sign, bright colors, and two exclamation points. And it's good for a limited time only? Better not miss out, buy now!"

Here, the scope of the reduction is kind of irrelevant. They basically scrapped the old deal and tried to write a new, smaller one. Had they scrapped the megafactory plans and decided to open a fast food franchise it could have been reduced a million fold!

The new agreement offers $80M and asks Foxconn to spend only $672M on a factory that will employ only 1,454 people by 2025. The original deal offered Foxconn $2.85B (or $2850M) to spend $10B ($10000M) and hire 13,000 by 2032. Big numbers are hard, but running the math it's now $55k/job and $0.13/dollar of capital investment, it was $220k/job and $0.285/dollar. $80M is 2.8% or a 30-fold reduction from $2.85B, but the full story is they've simultaneously reduced the ratios of the incentives and the scope of the required investment.

A complete understanding of what those numbers mean is really hard to develop, and isn't really distilled by a substitution in the headline of 30-fold to 30x. Human brains in general are busy and don't like to work too hard, and whether we use "30 fold" like "four score" in our daily vernacular or they say 97% and 80, the headline's effect is the same. It conveys to readers who don't want to run all the numbers about average salaries and payroll taxes and capital depreciation and so on that the previous administration tried to offer an excessively generous deal but the current government has rolled that back to something a lot smaller, don't worry about exactly how much but just trust that it's a lot.

Thanks