Was Rick Santorum our gateway asshole?
Yeah, Santorum got progressively worse but he’s nothing compared to those tea-party peeps.
Is Santorum at least still ant-Trump, or did he also drink the kool-ade?
He pretty much drank the Kool aid, but still looks visibly disgusted with himself sometimes.
He’s a piece of garbage.
Wisconsin still getting bent over by Walker’s idiocy:
Still not living up to the deal, apparently:
Nice scam if you can get it to work, spend $300 million for $3 billion in tax credits…
The state’s economic impact analysis was predicated on an enormous factory rapidly scaling up to employing 13,000 people and tapping into local supply chains. This hasn’t happened. In Foxconn’s original WEDC application, the company said it would invest $3.3 billion by the end of 2019. Its 2019 subsidy application shows it has invested only $280 million. (For unclear reasons, WEDC’s estimate in its response shows approximately $300 million, but either way, it is less than 10 percent of Foxconn’s target.)
In a normal election this would probably make the list of hot topics that Biden could hang around Trump’s neck, since he so vocally supported the deal.
This year, just add it to the list. It’s probably not in the top 100.
Foxconn was never, ever going to hold up their end. Any idiot with a brain would have known that.
This was always an obvious con, but it may well have put DJT over the top in Wisconsin. Just a few more people getting royally scammed by DJT. Last covered this in his Bulwark article today:
2. More Scams
Remember the Foxconn deal?
In 2018, Donald Trump went to the groundbreaking ceremony on the biggest deal ever in the history of deals. He had wrestled Foxconn, that shifty Taiwanese company that had stolen American jobs, to the ground and forced them to build a factory in America.
USA! USA!
The Foxconn factory was going to be built in Wisconsin and it was going to be, per President Trump, “the eighth wonder of the world.” It was going to bring so many jobs—all the jobs!—back to the American heartland. Sure, the state of Wisconsin had to give Foxconn $4 billion (with a “b”) in tax credits. And yes, that money technically came from Wisconsin taxpayers. But whatever. If you want to Make America Great Again you have to break a few eggs.
And Foxconn’s giant maga-factory (yswidt?) was going to bring 13,000 jobs to Wisconsin which, by total coincidence, was a state Trump needed to win reelection.
At the time, there were people who said “Hmmm. This does not seem to make any sense. Foxconn’s competitive advantage is manufacturing commoditized electronic components at scale using the cheapest possible labor. How does having a factory in the United States fit their business model? This smells like vaporware.”
But those were just ungrateful cucks who were still sad about Hillary Clinton not being president.
Well, Foxconn is in the news again. And like literally everything else in the Trump administration, it didn’t quite work out.
By last year it was clear that the factory was never going to be built. Instead, Foxconn had quietly reconceptualized the Wisconsin project as “research center” and then scaled back from there.
And as of this week, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation is desperately trying to claw back money from Foxconn.
Why?
Because two years in, the Foxconn operation in Wisconsin has a grand total of 281 employees.
Which is—if my math is right—12,719 fewer than Foxconn and Trump had promised.
Oh well.
The taxpayers of Wisconsin got royally turned over by Foxconn. But maybe they can frame their Trump 1000 Dollar Bills and hang them over the mantle as a consolation prize.
So the tax incentives were actually structured as “hey, here’s a giant check” rather than “here is an ongoing break in your state taxes, provided you hit these targets each year”?
Of course, it’s not like it the people who put the deal together for their personal political gain were giving away their own money.