July 27, 2017
That’s the arithmetic according to the Washington Post. The article told readers that Wisconsin governor Scott Walker claims he is giving $3 billion in economic incentives to the Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn. The company, in turn, says that it will build a factory that will eventually employ 3,000 people. It would have been helpful to include the arithmetic so it was clear how much Scott Walker planned to spend for each job that Foxconn claims it will create. (Foxconn has not always followed through on its promises, as the piece points out.)
It also would have been worth mentioning the importance of these jobs to Wisconsin’s labor market. The state currently has 472,000 manufacturing jobs (it added 7,900 in the last year), so the jobs pledged by Foxconn would increase this figure by just under 0.6 percent.
Addendum
As several comments noted, the Washington Post had a follow up piece that gives more details on this deal. The 3,000 jobs figure is the number who are originally expected to be employed in the factory when it is projected to be completed in 2020. Foxconn said the number of people employed has the “potential to grow” to 13,000. It appears that the full $3 billion in subsidies is at least partly contingent on the number of jobs actually created, although the terms do not seem to be clear at this point.
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