By Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner
When then-President Donald Trump held the first White House press conference in 2017 to tout the prospect of a massive television flat-screen factory for the Taiwan manufacturer Foxconn coming to Wisconsin, Madison writer Lawrence Tabak was immediately intrigued.
“If nothing else, as a Wisconsin taxpayer, I was concerned that this was going to be a major spending event for all of us who live in Wisconsin,” Tabak said in an interview. It also had a deja-vu quality.
Two decades earlier, Tabak had written a takedown for The Atlantic on the endless building spree of convention centers from one city to the next, driven by a revolving-door coterie of consultants who predicted they would revitalize local economies.
“It reminded me a bit of what I suspected was behind the enthusiasm for the Foxconn project,” Tabak says. “Which turned out, of course, to be exactly the case.”
Posted on November 20, 2021