I am a Wisconsinite, and I voted for Republicans that are pushing this into place. This whole thing stinks and I'm upset about it. I voted for job creation through lower taxes, not job creation through direct corporate handouts and bribery.
Outside of principled arguments against this sort of thing, one blatant issue is that Wisconsin taxpayers are paying for something that bolsters job creation in the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area. Racine is not Milwaukee, Racine is Chicago. The jobs being created and the local economy stimulus are going to spread to Elgin and Waukegan before it makes its way to West Bend and Janesville.
At the risk of taking this wildly off-topic, how you reconcile the massive failure of low taxes = jobs = more revenue in Kansas state politics over the last few years? Is there something about Kansas that makes that lesson not apply here?
Kansas is a good example to take a look at, but I'm not quite convinced of what went down there.
To the very least, it was very sudden and the benefits of lower taxes and increased employment cannot be immediate. Businesses change their expectations on daily decisions, not throw all the plans out the window on a tax reform. There are questions: where did the tax money saved go? Did people hoard it? did it go out of state?
It merits some analysis. Trickle-down is a moniker for an economic policy that is pretty straight forward: that which is not spent by the state its spend by the constituents.
That's the big difference here. Is the Wisconsin legislature qualified to say that the semiconductor industry is going to be stable for the next decade? The outcome of this plan is dependent on the continued growth of this targeted industry-- continued growth that the Wisconsin legislature has no way to predict and no place predicting.
As a model of government, this type of activity is unsustainable. They might not be wrong to bet on Foxconn, but they'll make bets in the future that won't pay off. Let the invisible hand work.
They're building it extremely close to the WI/IL border so I wonder how many people working there will actually be from IL. There's an agreement between IL/WI so that the employee taxes in the paycheck will go to IL and not WI.
Outside of principled arguments against this sort of thing, one blatant issue is that Wisconsin taxpayers are paying for something that bolsters job creation in the Chicago Metropolitan Statistical Area. Racine is not Milwaukee, Racine is Chicago. The jobs being created and the local economy stimulus are going to spread to Elgin and Waukegan before it makes its way to West Bend and Janesville.
edit: also, why is this on HN?