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In many ways, the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin is the physical manifestation of the alternate reality that has defined the Trump administration. Trump promised to bring back manufacturing, found a billionaire eager to play along, and now for three years the people of Wisconsin have been told to expect an LCD factory that plainly is not there. Into the gap between appearance and reality fell people’s jobs, homes, and livelihoods.

The buildings Foxconn has erected are largely empty....The heart of the project, the million-square-foot “Fab,” is just a shell.

[The state’s economic development dept], as part of its audit of the company’s 2019 subsidy application, had Foxconn survey its employees about what they were working on. Not a single respondent mentioned LCDs because no one is working on LCDs, and they never were.

The project has fallen orders of magnitude short of its hiring and investment targets...Foxconn itself acknowledged, in its subsidy submission, that it has so far invested 2.8 percent of the $10 billion it promised. It has built less than 2 percent of the 20 million square feet of manufacturing space it originally planned. [For a plant that was supposed to open this year].

The state is at an impasse. It can deny further subsidies, as it did last week, but taxpayer money has already been spent. The Village of Mount Pleasant took on hundreds of millions in debt that was supposed to be repaid by property taxes on Foxconn’s fantastic campus. It will now have to hope Foxconn honors its contractual obligation to make up the shortfall...

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mattkime
Better to cut loses on this one.

I don't understand what foxconn's endgame was on this one.

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A little more than two years later, the factory that was supposed to produce LCD screens for TVs and smartphones doesn't exist and "probably never will," reports The Verge this week in a must-read investigation...

"Even the handful of jobs the company claims to have created are less than real: many of them held by people with nothing to do, hired so the company could reach the number required for it to get tax subsidy payments from Wisconsin,"

... The state's Legislative Fiscal Bureau, a number-crunching agency similar to the federal Congressional Budget Office, calculated that it would take the state until 2043 to recoup the $3 billion handout, which was the largest such subsidy in Wisconsin history. Even if all 13,000 promised jobs went to Wisconsinites, the tab would be more than $230,000 per job created, the bureau found.

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A separate analysis conducted by the Mercatus Center, a free market think tank based at George Mason University, found that the higher taxes needed to cover the cost of Foxconn's tax breaks would "decrease Wisconsin's long-run GDP by about $20 billion over the 15-year life of the handout." And that tally didn't include the cost of local utility infrastructure updates, which the state promised to cover in full as part of the deal with Foxconn.