Allegheny County Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald tells the Post-Gazette that “Pennsylvania is well positioned to become competitive” in an effort to lure some kind of Foxconn facility to Penn’s Wood.
Translation: Hold onto your wallets, Keystone State taxpayers.
Foxconn is the world’s largest contract maker of electronics. It’s perhaps best known for making liquid crystal displays (LCDs) for Apple iPhones. It recently said it would build a $10 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) plant in Wisconsin to make LCD panels used in television and computer screens.
But that deal comes with a steep price for Badger State taxpayers – up to $3 billion (again, that’s billion with a “b”) in cash payments over 15 years if the facility ends up employing 13,000 people, the Post-Gazette reports.
But as The Washington Post detailed in a March 3 story, Foxconn has a pretty remarkable history of making grandiose promises it does not keep, including here in Pennsylvania.
To wit, four years ago Foxconn said it would invest $30 million (that’s million with an “m”) and hire 500 workers for a high-tech factory in Central Pennsylvania. Nothing came of it.
Three years ago, The Post said Foxconn hinted at building LCD facilities in Arizona and Colorado. Nothing. Indonesia? There was talk of a $1 billion facility. Nothing, the newspaper reports.
Promises of multibillion-dollars investments also were touted in India, Vietnam and Brazil. And while The Post says some facilities were built, the selling sizzle was far less than the delivered steak.
Now comes Wisconsin. Now comes again Pennsylvania, with one of its top elected officials touting a possible new Foxconn “investment” here.
But at least in Pennsylvania, it appears that Foxconn’s proposed 2013 “investment” faded away because, as it told CNN, the commonwealth – that is, taxpayers – didn’t cough up enough money to make the Harrisburg-area facility “economically viable.”
Sounds like a shakedown, does it not?
So how much have Pennsylvania “leaders” offered Foxconn on behalf of beneficent taxpayers. A spokesman for the state Department of Community and Economic Development said he couldn’t say. There was a non-disclosure agreement. Well, of course there was.
But that same spokesman did tell the P-G that the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf continues to “aggressively seek” such foreign investment.
ACE Fitzgerald, too, cited non-disclosure agreements to the newspaper in not talking specifics about taxpayers being, yet again, set up as venture capitalists. But he did say the region and the state are “well positioned’ to be included in any additional Foxconn expansion.
Translation: Even more taxpayer money.
No one should find any comfort in such an assessment. And the taxpaying public should demand the details of any offer, past or present, to which their “leaders” seek to indebt them once again.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
