Like with the Carrier debacle, it’s a victory for Trump not because jobs are created, but because he can say jobs are being created and then no one talks about what’s really going on, afterwards. Of course, he doesn’t really care whether they are or not - if he cared, the deals would be structured such that there would be some guarantees that are absent.
Besides the exemption from all taxes, from what I’ve read they are getting direct cash subsidies as well. It was potentially up to 1.4 billion dollars, but apparently even if they do nothing they still get at least half a billion dollars over a couple years (and more if they do some minimum of hiring and construction - they can get all the money even if they don’t remotely fulfill their promises). Plus, they’ve certainly benefited here in other ways - e.g. just on the “factory” property alone. They got cheap (possibly free) land, and tax-free construction materials, exemptions from local environmental laws, over a billion dollars of infrastructure improvements (roads, water, electricity, internet) that specifically benefit that property, which means that when they sell it on, it’ll be worth orders of magnitude more than whatever they spent on it. So yeah, even if they build nothing, they’ll be walking away with extra money in their pockets that could add up to billions.
Plus, the state has definitely spent billions. The company would never have gotten the tax breaks it’s getting if the state had known their real plans; the tax breaks aren’t just assuming a massive operation, but that the operation would be a cornerstone of a manufacturing hub that would be located there (which, it turns out, isn’t happening regardless of what Foxconn do). Add the direct subsidies to that, and it’s one hell of a scam.
