Throwing billions of dollars at companies because “jobs” isn’t what it used to be. I mean…$4.1 million per job created? Christalmighty! Just give me the $4.1 mil, I can create 20 jobs with that level of public largess.
When GOP darling Scott Walker offered to hand billions in subsidies to Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn, he was warned: the Foxconn MO is to suck up billions in public money for ambitious megafactories, then scale them back into small, largely irrelevant facilities (or cancel them altogether).
But that didn’t convince Walker: instead, he got right to business, seizing and bulldozing Wisconsinites’ homes to make way for the “factory,” and allowing the price-tag to rise by more than a billion dollars without blinking, even as the company started to hedge about the scale of the factory it would build in exchange for Walker’s huge welfare handout.
Now the other shoe has dropped: Louis Woo (special assistant to Foxconn chairman Terry Gou), who negotiated the Wisconsin deal, has told Reutersthat “In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory. You can’t use a factory to view our Wisconsin investment.”
Instead of the planned megafactory with its 5,200 blue-collar jobs by 2020, now the company proposes to hire 1,000 skilled R&D researchers — who will likely come from out of state.
But they still get more than $4 billion: so if the 1,000 jobs ever materialize, each one will have cost the state $4.1 million.
