When A Scammer Doubles Down on the Scam

In a rather self-serving interview, Alan Yeung, who was responsible for the Foxconn debacle in Wisconsin, provides some insight into how and why the deal came to pass, and why it failed.

The core reason is that government subsidies of private industries, whether it be abortive electronics plants, football stadiums, Amazon warehouses and headquarters, or the aforementioned Foxconn plant.

Nevertheless, this provides a useful insight into one of the more notorious failures of this fraud on the taxpayer:

Alan Yeung is a professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the former head of the Foxconn project in Wisconsin.

If you don’t quite remember, the Foxconn project in Wisconsin was announced in 2017 as a massive deal to build the first “Generation 10.5” LCD factory in North America. It was also one of the first big moments in the Trump presidency, complete with President Trump holding a golden shovel at a lavish groundbreaking ceremony where he said the factory would be “the eighth wonder of the world.”

The deal was supposedly quite simple: Foxconn (the company best known for manufacturing the iPhone), President Trump, and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker all announced that Foxconn would build a 20-million-square-foot display factory in Wisconsin that would bring 13,000 manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Wisconsin promised more than $4 billion in tax credits to Foxconn, cleared land by pushing people out of their homes, and diverted water from Lake Michigan to support the factory. A lot of people got excited about this promised American manufacturing renaissance and left good jobs to join it.

But it turned out that while Foxconn was putting on a great show, no LCD factory was actually getting built, even though Foxconn kept saying it was happening.

You can read the interview, but it basically comes down to, "Some people said nasty things about us, so we could not keep our promises.  (Spoiler, they never intended to keep those promises)

In particular, Mr. Yeung complains about Scott Walkers defeat as Governor as a turning point, which ignores the fact that the project has already been repeatedly downsized beyond recognition before his loss.

The efforts of both Walker and Foxconn to cover this up was a significant contributor to his being replaced by someone less friendly to the balderdash promulgated by the Taiwanese electronics giant.