When the Foxconn deal was announced a couple weeks ago, it was clear on its face that it was a horrible plan. Then, last week, the horrible got an overlay of odd.
Let’s review. Even under Foxconn’s own analysis, depending on how many of the estimated 3,000 to 13,000 are actually created, Wisconsin taxpayers would subsidize each job to the tune of $230,000 to almost $1 million. And these jobs would pay about 31 percent of what it would take a family of four to live a normal middle-class lifestyle. (A family of four needs to earn $131,000 to maintain the equivalent of a 1970’s middle-class lifestyle.) It turns out that hourly workers would only make about $41,600 a year, not the $53,000 in initial reports. Apparently, that higher average amount includes all salaries, even high-paid managers. To add injury to insult, the deal would allow the company to move streams, fill wetlands and pollute water without so much as telling us what they might destroy through an environmental impact statement.
So, last week Assembly leaders rushed this thing to a public hearing the way you rush an overripe cantaloupe to the refrigerator — before too many people notice the smell. At that hearing you would have expected Foxconn to, oh, I don’t know, maybe show up? Nope. These guys are asking state taxpayers to fork over $3 billion over 15 years and we know they’ll ask local taxpayers wherever they land to give them even more. They don’t want to follow the environmental rules every other Wisconsin business has to follow. And yet they didn’t respect us enough to so much as catch a flight to Madison, make their case and answer questions.
Now, I can understand why Foxconn’s leaders might have wanted to take a pass. Would you want to have to answer tough questions about why you’ve made glitzy promises just like this one all over the world only to not deliver in the end? Would you want to have to explain why you can afford to invest $10 billion in a factory and still need the taxpayers to pick up 17 percent of your wages? Would you want to squirm in your chair as you try to explain why that taxpayers’ subsidy could include managers making hundreds of thousands of dollars? Would you want to answer why a company that makes liquid-crystal screens is demanding exemptions from environmental regulations — if you didn’t plan to degrade and to pollute our water, why wouldn’t you just follow the rules that apply to every other manufacturer?
There would have been other good questions along those lines, but Foxconn wasn’t there to answer them. Instead, state officials, led by Department of Administration Secretary Scott Neitzel, who isn’t a bad guy, did their best to keep the lipstick on the pig. But it wasn’t the same as getting answers and assurances directly from the beneficiary of all that public largesse.
Beyond the information that didn’t get presented and the assurances that couldn’t be extracted for the record, there was the just plain, flat-out arrogance of believing that you are entitled to feed at the public trough and pollute the public’s environment without so much as saying, “please.” This should offend our Midwestern sensibilities.
Then, as if that wasn’t strange enough, Madison’s mayor rushed back to his podium to announce that our city ought to get its piece of this rancid pie. Paul Soglin blasted the deal in the very same breath that he pleaded to be part of it, pitching the abandoned Oscar Mayer site for something or other, which is “medical-related.” What that would be is left unclear, as it is obscured by secret discussions between Foxconn and the local economic development group you’ve never heard of — but which apparently is negotiating on your behalf — called MadREP.
In an Inspector Clouseau-worthy twist, MadREP (which, by the way, stands for Madison Regional Economic Partnership) is talking with an entity it codenames “Project Varsity.” Soglin had the good sense to just come out and say it was Foxconn, for crying out loud. Maybe if this plays out with even more fanciful Foxconn deals, MadREP could code name them “Build Me Up Buttercup,” “Jump Around,” and, if a project really gets juicy, “Sweet Caroline.”
To top it off, the right wing group Americans For Prosperity made the week even more bizarre by making sense. “As free-market activists who staunchly oppose government tax incentives, we cannot support the expensive refundable tax credits in this package, which are not available to every other business in our state,” AFP director Eric Bott said in a statement, according to the Wisconsin State Journal. I absolutely agree with Americans For Prosperity. Can somebody check the temperature in hell?
So, let’s recap. The Taiwanese mega-company that is demanding a record $3 billion, including about $74 million in actual cash payments every year, from Wisconsin taxpayers and which wants exemptions from some of our most important environmental regulations, didn’t even have the courtesy to show up at a public hearing and make their pitch. Then Madison’s mayor, seeking to have it both ways, blasted the state giveaway while pleading for Madison’s share of it. And the madcap MadREP is meeting with the Taiwanese, no doubt in underground parking ramps while wearing trench coats and dark glasses, to hammer out the details in “Project Varsity,” because, after all, you wouldn’t want the public to know where the public’s money is going.
It was a crazy week for a crazy plan, but this week things might get more serious as the highly-respected nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau will offer its own independent analysis.
