Corporate welfare..

[stpioc]

In June, Donald Trump traveled to Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn’s new manufacturing plant—a 20 million-square-foot complex that state officials say will create 13,000 jobs for southeastern Wisconsin over the next 15 years.

By the time Trump visited the site, however, those claims were already in doubt. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a Republican, had offered Foxconn CEO Terry Gou nearly $3 billion in tax credits and exemptions to move his company to the state. But Wisconsin won’t get any of that money back until 2042, only breaking even then—according to a report released by the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau last August—if Foxconn gives all 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin residents. Thus far, the company has only committed to 3,000. And it has reneged on these kinds of promises before. In 2013, the company said it would hire 500 workers and spend $30 million on a plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and then never built it.

Lavish, lousy incentive deals aren’t unusual. These packages rarely influence corporate executives; CEOs tend, instead, to look for good infrastructure and skilled labor when selecting a new location. According to research by Timothy Bartik at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, tax incentives only change their minds between 2 and 25 percent of the time..

The Enduring Scam of Corporate Tax Breaks | The New Republic