"The Trump administration handed out taxpayer dollars to a foreign company. Hundreds of homes and farms were bulldozed, and over $500 million in taxpayer dollars were wasted preparing for Foxconn."
It might be funny, she added — except that local and state governments spent roughly $500 million to buy land, bulldoze houses and build infrastructure for an unfulfilled manufacturing megasite that was supposed to include dozens of futuristic buildings and a factory to produce flat-panel displays for televisions. [...] By the time the Foxconn deal was slimmed down, the Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County had already borrowed more than a combined $300 million to buy land and lay water and sewer pipes required by the originally promised LCD factory. State taxpayers and a local utility, meanwhile, were in the process of spending nearly $300 million on roads and power lines, according to the Wisconsin Legislative Fiscal Bureau. [...] Soon after the initial grand promises, Foxconn began repeatedly changing plans for the site, throwing out so many ideas that locals lost track. First it said the LCD factory would be scaled down to produce smaller flat-panel displays. Then, even as houses were being demolished in early 2019, a Foxconn executive told Reuters: "In Wisconsin we’re not building a factory." A conversation with Trump prompted the company to backtrack again and recommit to an LCD plant.