Foxconn was supposed to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin. It was supposed to revitalize American manufacturing. It was supposed to, as President Trump put it, be “one of the great deals ever.” Most of all, it was meant to be a living proof of concept that manufacturing could come back to the U.S. and that Trump was the man to do it.
Instead, the much-discussed project is a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that is hurting the very people it was meant to help.
As Austin Carr, writing for Bloomberg Businessweek, details in his expose, the Foxconn factory deal will likely never come to fruition. The promised jobs aren’t coming to the Mount Pleasant factory, and “Made in the U.S.A.” television manufacturing isn’t going to be any more than empty words from the president.
As Louis Woo, the special assistant to Foxconn’s Chief Executive Terry Gou, told Reuters in January: “in terms of TV, we have no place in the U.S.” Adding, “We can’t compete.”
That, of course, is quite far from Trump’s words last summer where he told his assembled audience: “As Foxconn has discovered, there is no better place to build, hire, and grow than right here in the U.S.”
But the problem is not just that Foxconn isn’t going to help Wisconsin’s blue-collar workers. Worse, the factory and all of its false promises have actually cost taxpayers millions of dollars, even before the tax subsidies that it has yet to qualify for as it has yet to hit hiring requirements.
As Carr highlights:
Even if it had created the promised jobs, under the original agreement with Foxconn, the jobs would have cost the state at least $219,000 each.
That’s money that could have gone to community development, jobs training, small business investments, or other improvements geared toward viable local projects. Instead, it was funneled to a Chinese company that seemed to have little intention of ever following through.
The Foxconn factory built on Wisconsin farmland was meant to show the viability of bringing manufacturing back to the Midwest. It didn’t. Instead, it illustrated that even billions of dollars of taxpayer money can’t turn back the clock and, more importantly, that corporate welfare comes at the expense of the very people who are promised to benefit.
As 2020 competition heats up, that should be an important and painful lesson as candidates rush to promise Rust Belt workers the impossible.
