Johnson: Senator suggests Illinois pay portion of Foxconn incentives.
Senator says neighbor states will also benefit
Republican Sen. Ron Johnson appeared to suggest Tuesday that the $3 billion burden to Wisconsin taxpayers to locate a Foxconn plant in the state should be shared with their neighbors to the south.
“The question is, should Wisconsin be the one to bear the full three (billion dollars)? Illinois and their workers will benefit. America will benefit,” Johnson said, referring to the fact that some of the Foxconn labor pool will likely come from across the border.
The Wisconsin senator said the public-private partnership ratio in the proposed Foxconn project is a good deal. The Taiwanese company will pay $10 billion to build its plant with the state kicking in up to $3 billion in incentives.
Johnson acknowledged the hurdles facing the project that could employ as many as 13,000 people to build flat screen display panels in southeastern Wisconsin.
“The questions asked by our legislators are the right ones. There should be some skepticism,” Johnson said during a Milwaukee Rotary Club meeting. “In the end, it’s probably a risk worth taking.”
Asked to clarify Johnson’s statement about sharing the public burden of a Foxconn project, the senator’s spokesman, Ben Voelkel, said in an email: “There’s a number of factors involved in a big project like this, and Senator Johnson trusts Governor Walker and the state Legislature to determine a solution that promotes job growth and protects taxpayers.”
Johnson also predicted Congress will pass tax reform by the end of the year and said efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare are not over.
Johnson said in hindsight President Donald Trump probably wishes the statement he made on Monday condemning the violence in Charlottesville, Va., were made two days earlier, when he was criticized for not explicitly denouncing white supremacists. He also said that partisan fighting in Congress is blown out of proportion and that there’s a great deal of respect between lawmakers.
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of divisions. We just saw that played out in Charlottesville. The division in this country is undeniable. From my standpoint, as elected officials, we (must) do everything we can to tamp down the rhetoric,” Johnson said.
“If there’s ever a moment of time in our nation’s history, this is the moment for coming together to address the enormous challenges facing our society and facing our world.”
A woman in the audience asked Johnson for his response to Trump’s assertion that Obamacare should be allowed to implode as well as his opinion about high-risk insurance pools for people with pre-existing health conditions being urged by Republican lawmakers who want to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act.
Johnson said he’s doing everything he can to repair Obamacare while acknowledging the positive aspects of the health care law. But he disputed the woman’s assertion that high-risk pools resulted in high premiums. He said the problem with Obamacare is that a small percentage of the American population is bearing the burden of people with expensive pre-existing conditions. He recommended spreading the cost to more people.
“The problem with covering people with preexisting conditions is that in an insurance market, just like auto insurance or property casualty (insurance), if you force insurance companies to sell to somebody who just totaled their car or their house just burned down, first of all who would ever buy insurance until that happened — the same kind of dynamic occurs” with health insurance, Johnson said