To answer, politicians and media must take off the rose-colored glasses. If Foxconn builds a factory, it will employ not thousands of workers but rather dozens or hundreds of skilled technicians operating robots. Trump’s projection of 50,000 workers is no more accurate than his claim about the number of attendees at his inauguration. And Foxconn will demand hundreds of millions of dollars in public subsidies.

We’ve been down this road before. Remember when GM cynically played 24 states against each other to see who could provide GM with the most public money for its Saturn plant? Tennessee won with a public subsidy of $240 million, $26,000 per job.

A decade later Mercedes selected Alabama for a new plant. But it cost the state dearly. Tax breaks and other subsidies were close to $300 million, almost $200,000 for each job.

If the past experience is a guide, Gov. Walker and company will be happy to fork over billions of dollars or more to Foxconn for its promises. The Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s sordid lack of accountability on subsidies demonstrates that the current GOP legislative majority couldn’t care less about requiring recipient firms to create any jobs.

So that challenges citizens and the media to insist on strict requirements before any Foxconn subsidy: