September 19, 2018 — September 18 marked the one-year anniversary of the bill authorizing massive subsidies for a Foxconn plant in southeast Wisconsin. Although we still don’t know many specifics about the plant that will be built and the new jobs that will result, we have learned a lot in the last year, and the current picture is considerably different than what we had been led to believe a year ago.
January 29, 2018 –A new Legislative Fiscal Bureau document reveals that the potential costs of public assistance for Foxconn have risen to about $4.5 billion. Our analysis of the LFB figures shows that more than $1 billion of those costs has no direct tie to job creation.
August 21, 2017 — The proposed package of incentives aimed at encouraging Foxconn to build a manufacturing facility in southeast Wisconsin could cost the state more than $3 billion in the next 15 years. This analysis summarizes five of the reasons why the proposed deal is a poor use of public resources.
August 17, 2017 — Using two less optimistic sets of assumptions about the jobs created by Foxconn, our calculations show that the proposed Foxconn subsidies might never be offset by increased state tax revenue.
August 16, 2017 — When the Legislative Fiscal Bureau wrote that it would take until at least 2043 for Wisconsin to break even on the Foxconn subsidies, they were summarizing an analysis that used the “best case” assumptions. Using the same methodology and most of the same assumptions, a new Wisconsin Budget Project analysis calculates that other scenarios within the range described by Foxconn could mean that the cost of the state subsidies would not be recovered until 2050 or 2058.
February 2, 2017 — A tax credit that allows manufacturers and some other businesses to pay next to nothing in income taxes has ballooned far beyond original cost estimates and is slanted to favor a small group of wealthy claimants. Most of the credit goes towards reducing income taxes for millionaires, with some tax filers with incomes of over $1 million receiving tax cuts of more than $100,000.
January 23, 2017 — Wisconsin ranks 35th in the number of government workers per population, meaning Wisconsin’s state and local governments are leaner than all but 15 other states. The number of public employees in Wisconsin has fallen over time, and current levels of public employment are significantly lower than they were around the turn of the century.
June 28, 2016 — A new tax credit that allows manufacturers and some other businesses to pay next to nothing in income taxes has ballooned far beyond original cost estimates and has done little to promote job creation.