Weekly Fiscal Facts are provided by the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. The Wisconsin Public Policy Forum logo can be downloaded here.
Wisconsin provided $928.1M of aid to manufacturing in 2016
Over more than 40 years, Wisconsin leaders of both parties have made a series of decisions to provide incentives to manufacturers. The state provided or authorized an estimated $928.1 million in tax advantages and incentive awards for the industry in fiscal 2016, the last year for which complete figures are available, up from an inflation-adjusted $724.5 million in 2008. Since 2016, the tax advantages and incentives for state manufacturers (and potentially their customers) have risen and will likely continue to do so as existing benefits are phased in and new ones added, such as the recent award to Foxconn.
To place them in context, the tax advantages and incentives to manufacturers totaled more than 80 percent of state funding for either the Department of Corrections or the University of Wisconsin System in fiscal 2016. In that 12-month period, manufacturing accounted for 465,100 Wisconsin jobs. So though these incentives are large and growing, they are spread across a vast workforce that helps contain the costs on a per job basis.
Some of these tax advantages are unusual, but many are provided by other upper Midwest states, potentially making them harder to drop. Two national reviews rated Wisconsin’s overall effective taxes on manufacturers and export industries as generally below the national average, though the taxes of neighboring states fall both below and above our own.
This information is a service of the Wisconsin Policy Forum, the state’s leading resource for nonpartisan state and local government research and civic education. Learn more at wispolicyforum.org.
