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Another Trump deal turning into a tax-eating dud that will be financed by taxpayers and will never produce the number of white collar jobs promised.
Trump has a habit of creating deals that turn brown and smelly after the fanfare fades.
The filthy lucre professional Jared Kushner is fingered in this deal and he is probably getting gifts under the table.
Trump’s “Incredible” Foxconn Deal Turns Out to Be a Another Massive Con Job
Trump has a habit of creating deals that turn brown and smelly after the fanfare fades.
The filthy lucre professional Jared Kushner is fingered in this deal and he is probably getting gifts under the table.
Trump’s “Incredible” Foxconn Deal Turns Out to Be a Another Massive Con Job
TRUMP’S “INCREDIBLE” FOXCONN DEAL TURNS OUT TO BE A ANOTHER MASSIVE CON JOB
This may turn out to be the great dealmaker’s greatest scam yet.
BY BESS LEVIN
NOVEMBER 5, 2018 6:44 PM“Have I used the word ‘incredible’ enough times?”
Last month, at a rally in Mosinee, Wisconsin, Donald Trump introduced Governor Scott Walker to the stage with a boast regarding a dubious, shared accomplishment. “I got him set up with an incredible company called Foxconn,” Trump told the crowd, referring to the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing giant that had agreed to build its first U.S. plant in the Badger State. “[Foxconn] came to Wisconsin with the most incredible plan . . . It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. We toured it, and we had a ribbon-cutting a few months ago. And I handed it over to Scott . . . there’s no plant like it anywhere in the United States. One of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen. One of the most incredible things.”
And it’s true! There is nothing like the literally incredible Foxconn deal in the United States, because the Foxconn deal—brokered by First Son-in-Law Jared Kushner—has turned out to be less of a jobs boon than an economic nuclear bomb, and not the good kind, either. To put it more elegantly, the Foxconn deal is the ultimate example of Trump promising Americans the world and then handing them a flaming bag of s--t.
Dan Kaufman, writing for The New Yorker, illuminates some of the many ways that the Foxconn deal will screw Wisconsin locals for years to come:
All this, when the U.S. economy is already minting some 200,000 jobs a month, was designed to create 13,000 new, middle-class manufacturing jobs, as Foxconn and Trump promised. Except, as Kaufman reports, the Foxconn deal will actually create far fewer jobs, and most of them will not be of the blue-collar variety.
- The deal will cost taxpayers more than $4.5 billion in subsidies, but because manufacturing companies in Wisconsin are already exempt from paying taxes, “Foxconn, which generated a hundred and fifty-eight billion dollars in revenue last year, will receive much of this subsidy in direct cash payments from taxpayers”—the largest subsidy given to a foreign corporation in U.S. history
- If Wisconsinites ever see a return on their investment, it’ll be in 2042 at the earliest, according to analysis from the nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau
- Good old Scott Pruitt did Foxconn a solid by “overrul[ing] the objections of his staff to grant most of southeastern Wisconsin an exemption from limits on smog pollution” so the plant can poison the air to its heart’s delight
- The company has been granted special court privileges by the state legislature, like the ability to make numerous appeals of unfavorable rulings in a single case
- The town’s Village Board of Trustees has been using eminent domain to expel obstinate homeowners, forcing them to “sell at a price determined by the village.” They’ve been able to do so by decreeing the 2,800-acre area around the plant “blighted,” a designation typically reserved for property that is “detrimental to the public health, safety, or welfare,” but which the board has extended to include property that “impairs or arrests the sound growth of the community”
. . . the company recently changed the type of factory it plans to build, downsizing to a highly automated plant that will only require three thousand employees, ninety per cent of them “knowledge workers,” such as engineers, programmers, and designers. Almost all of the assembly work will be done by robots. Terry Gou,Foxconn’s chairman, has said he plans to replace eighty percent of Foxconn’s global workforce with “Foxbots” in the next five to ten years. The company still says it will hire thirteen thousand employees in Wisconsin, but it has fallen short of similar promises in Brazil, India, and Pennsylvania, among other places. Foxconn has already replaced sixty thousand workers who were earning roughly $2.50 an hour in China. Even the expansion of I-94, which is being done to accommodate Foxconn (and being paid for by Wisconsin taxpayers) reflects Foxconn’s faith in automation: the company and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation have discussed dedicating lanes to self-driving cars and trucks.
The problems go on and on. Because the plant will be located 20 miles from the Illinois border, many employees will likely not actually be Wisconsin residents. There are concerns from local environmental groups regarding what will become of the water supply. Billions in taxpayer money will be shifted away from places they could be used—like on the state’s crumbling roads or understaffed rural schools. All this, again, to create very few jobs, in the scheme of things. According to calculations by two former University of Wisconsin business-school professors, “if Foxconn’s taxpayer subsidies were given to random entrepreneurs, the money would generate more than ninety thousand jobs.”
The Foxconn deal is, in other words, a lot like many of the other “incredible“ feats brought to America by the mind behind Trump University and the United States Football League and the Carrier plant that laid off more than 600 workers and the Ford factory that got moved to China and the trillion-dollar corporate tax cut that has mysteriously failed to trickle down. Incredible, indeed.
In a statement, a company representative said, “Foxconn is fully committed to our investment of at least $10 billion in building our state-of-the-art Wisconsin Valley Science and Technology Park in Wisconsin and to meeting all contractual obligations with the relevant government agencies.”