I wonder… where is the best place to build an entirely automated factory?
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What a bullshit headline that is.
If Foxconn didn’t set up shop in Wisconsin, do you think the taxpayers of Wisconsin would be better off?
The taxpayers aren’t giving them $3 billion. It’s that the state isn’t collecting $3 billion. It’s a pretty important distinction because one leaves the state poorer, the other doesn’t.
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The best place is close to your customers.
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The two will multiply together, and people will really want to kill themselves in Wisconsin, instead of just feeling sorta bad about themselves and their Packer lust.
From the linked article:
And because Wisconsin already waives almost all taxes on manufacturing profits in the state, these incentives represent not a lost opportunity at collecting revenue but an obligation to pay cash to Foxconn out of the state treasury for up to 15 years. When including a $150 million sales tax break for buying construction material, the incentive package could total up to $3 billion, according to the bill that lawmakers could vote on as soon as Tuesday.
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Supposedly the 3000 are just the start, and they’re going to hire a good deal more, but that still ends up being something like $230,000 per employee (not counting the local government costs). And Foxconn is known for being on an automation tear these days, so who knows how many of the promised jobs beyond the 3000 will even show up?
Less than that if the promised number of jobs ever show up (but…), although still substantially more than the state is going to get in taxes per employee.
Even automated factories have a few workers. For a plant this size, about the number of workers who are supposed to make up the “initial” team, for example…
Ah, the Kansas model of “totally fucking your economy.”
Yes it is, because in this case they’re explicitly saying that this goes beyond the usual tax breaks the state already gives to manufacturers (who effectively pay nothing in taxes) to actual cash subsidies. So yes, this is leaving the state poorer for having the company locate its plant there. Although even if it was just a tax break and exemption from environmental regulations, you don’ t think this will cost the state money? Who’s going to pay the cost of the environmental clean-up from which they’re exempting Foxconn? Who’s going to pay for the sweetheart real estate deals they’re going to be setting up? Etc.
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Anything that impacts the Great Lakes is supposed to be approved by a council of the states that touch the lakes as well as Canada. Every state (and Canada) is effectively downstream of Wisconsin except Illinois and Indiana. Wisconsin does not have independent authority to grant removal of water in large volumes from Lake Michigan nor to allow industrial effluent into the Lake.
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A lot of people believe arguments like this. But it’s not a logical argument. The state will still be paying for repairs of infrastructure. The people will end up paying more out of their pockets to pay for this, because Foxconn’s come along, using (up) lots of the state’s infrastructure, and not paying their share of taxes to use them.
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I don’t see more recent data than this
but it appears that Kansas is right about in the middle when it comes to state economies. Some more highly taxed states are doing worse than Kansas, and some are doing better, indicating that there’s not much causation at work here.
Yeah, and what really pisses me off is that every other small and medium sized business in the state is paying that tax on construction supplies, pulling the wagon in which Foxconn rides. As a free market libertarian, I say fuck that. With a Brillo pad dipped in nitric acid.
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The state will be $3 Billion poorer than they would be if those 3000 residents got jobs at other employers.
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Correction, Boing Boing: Foxconn is a Taiwanese company with manufacturing in China. It is not a Chinese company.
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No, this is the end game of capitalism in it’s actual functional form, not the fantasy world of Ayn Rand novels. This is what happens when you remove any incentive to be beholden to society to the benefit of your wealth. Cronyism is capitalism, libertarians just like to pretend it isn’t because it screws with their delusional world view of everyone being perfectly rational actors.
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In 2016 it’s sitting at 0.84%
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The mainland Chinese government would beg to differ.
In any case, is a company based in Taiwan which exploits the US as well as the mainland somehow better than one that only exploits workers on the mainland?
It’s worth comparing Foxconn to Huawei. No corporation is exactly saintly, but Huawei seems in a completely different league (and it’s employee owned). I am sure Wisconsin could have done better than Foxconn, even looking at Chinese partners.
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When will people stop supporting companies with such dubious practices.
/posted from my iPhone
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The outcome would be better if you gave 1/2 a million dollars to 6,000 people who would then go out and start their own companies. You would end up with more employment and no further commitment, and all the tax revenue of the companies you just launched.
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The guys at Foxconn I know said working for Huawei was much worse, even if they bought the products. Personal anecdote, but until Foxconn was forced to move servers north the workers claimed to like it there.
How? Corporations are so complicated that people can’t understand who’s doing what to who. And this is deliberate. I have multiple graduate degrees in engineering, including a phd, and I don’t understand any of it. I have to spend all my time trying to understand my field. If I tried to do the research to figure out who is doing what, I wouldn’t have time for anything else.
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There’s the problem right there. Doctors, especially those with multiple MEngs and the like, are supposed to know all there is to know about a small but distinctive piece of the world. It’s us thickos with only a couple of quite ordinary degrees who have had experience of a number of different fields that have the time, in our unimportant little lives, to learn about stuff in a generalist kind of way.
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