Wisconsin Picks a Loser.

• Author: Murray, Phil R.

Foxconned: Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes & the Sacking of Local Government

By Lawrence Tabak

290 pp.; University of Chicago Press, 2021

In July 2017, then-Wisconsin governor Scott Walker announced that Taiwan-based tech manufacturer Foxconn would build a $10 billion display panel plant in the Badger State, creating 13,000 jobs. The project would, of course, be boosted by state and local government inducements, including subsidies, tax breaks, infrastructure, and public seizure of private land for the facility. The project quickly became a symbol of then-president Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" agenda, and Trump went so far as to scout possible sites for the plant from a helicopter alongside Foxconn founder and CEO Terry Gou. Trump, Walker, and Gou did the ceremonial shoveling of dirt at the groundbreaking in June 2018 in the Racine County town of Mount Pleasant in the state's southeast corner, with Trump proclaiming the plant would be "the Eighth Wonder of the World."

Yet, as the project proceeded, skepticism grew that it would resemble anything like what Walker, Trump, and Gou had touted. The skeptics have subsequently been proven right, as Foxconn has repeatedly scaled back its ambitions and changed the plant's output. Currently, the facility is manufacturing servers and 5G networking gear, and Foxconn now expects to invest just $672 million and employ fewer than 1,500 people at the site.

This tale is chronicled in the book Fox-conned by corpo rate communications executive and independent writer Lawrence Tabak. The book does such a good job of weaving together economics, history, and politics that it is being published by the University of Chicago Press. It effectively illustrates what can go wrong when government officials try to orchestrate economic development.

Corporate welfare / Tabak describes how "Wisconsin [promised it] would provide up to $3 billion in incentives based on a 17 percent rebate of Foxconn's payroll and a 10 percent rebate of its capital investment," while Mount Pleasant handled the acquisition of the real estate and the building of the infrastructure.

Mount Pleasant officials paid for the property they took, but many of those payments were shady. The officials offered some owners of large tracts $50,000 per acre, but others got "predevelopment market prices, which could be as low as $5,000 per acre." Officials notified owners of small tracts that their properties were in the path of highway construction and offered them "market value plus 40 percent." But they also misled homeowners who balked at selling into believing that they would lose the ability to drive to and from their homes.

Mount Pleasant officials also voted to declare the properties blighted. Tabak points out that "one of the qualifying criteria is a crime rate three times the...