Journalists and state assemblymen acting on their own initiative have estimated that the total of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's Foxconn deal had exploded to over $4 billion, but now it's official.
The state's Legislative Fiscal Bureau, which is like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for the state, now estimates the total cost of the deal has reached $4.5 billion.
A newly released memo projects the public cost for a planned Foxconn manufacturing project near Racine could near $4.5 billion — nearly 50 percent more than the $3 billion cost initially cited by the project’s chief proponent at the state Capitol, Gov. Scott Walker. [...]
The breakdown of public costs from the project, according to the memo, is as follows:
-State tax credits, $2.85 billion
-Local government incentives, $764 million
-U.S. Interstate 94 North-South project, $408 million
-Utility costs, $140 million
-State sales tax exemption, $139 million
-Road improvements, $134 million
-Worker training, $20 million
-Local government grants, $15 million
It was estimated that the Foxconn project would pay for itself at some point in the year 2043, but that was when the total cost of the project was estimated to be $3 billion and that assumes the factory will employ 13,000 people, mostly residents of Wisconsin, for most of the duration.
You'd have to be crazy to think this factory that will produce LCD displays will still be operating at full capacity, or at all, in 2043. You'd have to be crazy to think it would only cost $3 billion or even $4.5 billion because that doesn't include interest. And you'd have to be crazy to think it will employ that many residents of Wisconsin.
In fact, there aren't enough residents of Wisconsin to employ. Governor Walker has pledge to spend $6.8 million on an ad campaign aimed at persuading residents of Illinois to work at the new factory because there just aren't enough able-bodied people in the area of the state it's being built in.