Thursday, September 21, 2017

Trump's Big CON: He Loves Welfare, For Corporations (The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON, CONt.)

UPDATE:  "Before the Taiwanese manufacturing giant Foxconn pledged to spend $10 billion and create 13,000 jobs in Wisconsin, the company made a similar promise in Brazil.

At a news conference in Brazil, Foxconn officials unveiled plans to invest billions of dollars and build one of the world’s biggest manufacturing hubs in the state of São Paulo. The government had high expectations that the project would yield 100,000 jobs.

Six years later, Brazil is still waiting for most of those jobs to materialize.

'The area where Foxconn said it would build a plant is totally abandoned,' said Guilherme Gazzola, the mayor of Itu, one of the cities that hoped to benefit from the project. 'They haven’t even expressed an interest in meeting us.' . .

Today, Foxconn employs only about 2,800 workers in Brazil.

Foxconn does the 'big song and dance, bringing out the Chinese dragon dancers, ribbon cuttings, toasts and signature of the usual boilerplate agreements,' said Alberto Moel, an investor and adviser to early-stage tech companies who until recently was a technology analyst at the research firm Sanford C. Bernstein. 'Then, when it gets down to brass tacks, something way smaller materializes.' . .

Foxconn’s plans also fizzled in Pennsylvania. In 2013, the company, which has a small office in Harrisburg, said it intended to build a $30 million factory in the state that could employ 500 workers. The plant has yet to be built. . .

After the election, Foxconn joined a parade of global companies bearing promises.

Jack Ma, the executive chairman of the Chinese internet giant Alibaba, arrived at Trump Tower in New York and pledged to create one million jobs in America. Masayoshi Son, the founder of SoftBank of Japan, said his company would invest $50 billion in the United States. And at around the same time, Foxconn said it was planning to build production facilities in the United States."

Read The New York Times, Before Wisconsin, Foxconn Vowed Big Spending in Brazil. Few Jobs Have Come.

"President Donald Trump’s quest to open more factories and corporate headquarters in the U.S. scored a major win Thursday as Wisconsin lawmakers approved the biggest corporate subsidy package ever awarded to a foreign company.

But if Trump’s policies -- including his call to slash the corporate income-tax rate to 15 percent -- succeed in spurring more U.S. plant openings, the $3 billion in state aid that Wisconsin ponied up for Foxconn Technology Group may be only the beginning. Some analysts foresee a rush of new state-level subsidies and tax breaks as governors compete for any new facilities built by companies suddenly flush with newfound tax savings.

Call it tax reform in reverse".

Read Bloomberg, Trump’s Push for U.S. Jobs May Spur Boom in ‘Corporate Welfare’.

Read also Trump's Big CON: The Wisconsin Foxconn Jobs CON.