This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 19th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Amazon has abandoned its plans to locate parts of its HQ2 in New York City,

and the much hailed FoxCon deal that Scott Walker cut on behalf of the people of Wisconsin

seems likely to do a lot less for workforce development than originally promised.

Why do government-led sweetheart incentive deals so often disappoint?

John Mosina is president of the Center for Economic Accountability.

We spoke last week.

When Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, presented to the public this deal that he had cut with FoxCon, the idea was

this is going to be a massive high-tech manufacturing facility in the United States.

It's going to provide a lot of solid good, well-paid jobs in Wisconsin. What's happened since then?

Well FoxCon came out sort of quietly and said effectively that they were transitioning their plans for the facility to more of a research and

development hub than a manufacturing.

That there would still be some manufacturing, but it was going to be sort of more one-off specialized sort of artisanal or

boutique production and that set off a lot of controversy because the Foxcom plan, as you said, had been sold as

as bringing high-tech manufacturing back to America, back to the Midwest, and moving to a model where there'd be a lot fewer sort of blue-collar workers

building things and a lot more white-collar PhD types researching things that was not what the taxpayers of Wisconsin had said. Now

politics got involved, the White House got involved, the recalls back and forth and

Fox Con has sort of since said you you know, well, we're still

going to be doing manufacturing there, but that was not

what they said before the politician said.

So for those of us who watch these kinds of deals, it wasn't surprising to see the ball move after the ink was dry on the contract.

...