But Wisconsin remains on the hook for as much as $1.34 billion for the doomed project. The folly of throwing money at corporations as a jobs strategy has never been clearer.
The over/under on job creation for the Foxconn project in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, was always approximately zero, and I would have taken the under every time. The ballyhooed deal officially blew up this week, when the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer—famed for producing Apple’s iPhones in an immense Chinese factory so dehumanizing that it drove workers there to suicide—dramatically downsized its promised $10 billion commitment in the plant by more than 90 percent, and reduced its jobs promise to 1,454, down from 13,000. The new targets just delay the inevitable pullout, leaving behind an enormous debt for local officials and ratepayers, who prepared themselves for an industrial revolution that will never come.
Read the full story in American Prospect.