UW's Noah WIlliams isn't just a RW hack. He's a Koch addict

I've talked before about the fraud that is Noah Williams, a UW Economics professor who happens to come up with "studies" that favor right-wing policy when all other analysis says otherwise. An example of his fallacious crap was this masterpiece of cherry-picking which claimed Wisconsin's Manufacturers and Agriculture tax credit was growing manufacturing employment in the state...right before the "gold standard" jobs report said Wisconsin lost nearly 3,800 jobs in manufacturing for 2016.

Well, Noah was back at it recently, claiming that the Fox-con would be a massive economic boost for the state. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel dutifully reported on Williams' "analysis", which allowed Governor Walker and other GOP politicians to point to the stories as "proof" that the Fox-con will work.

Bruce Murphy of Urban Milwaukee saw how this was playing out, and called bullshit on Williams, the pro-corporate hack who hired him, and the pro-corporate paper that relayed the "news."

The newspaper’s front page story touted a new report concluding the state could get “a return of $3.90 for every $1 in state subsidy costs spent to lure Foxconn” to Wisconsin. The problems with the report are many, but let’s begin with the elephant in the room. The author of the “evaluation,” as he describes it, is UW-Madison economist Noah Williams, a fan of Gov. Scott Walker who sought a job with the governor as a campaign advisor and who previously issued a study of the impact of the Agriculture and Manufacturing Tax Credit that was quickly discredited.

Yet the Journal Sentinel story, whose headline announces that “Foxconn could return nearly $4 for every $1 in state subsidy,” never mentioned any of this baggage. It’s an incredible omission, and behind that is a story of how the media works (or doesn’t) and the unseemly haste to pass the multi-billion Foxconn deal before the problems with it are understood by the public.

For starters, the report was commissioned by the Wisconsin Technology Council, which has been an aggressive champion of the Foxconn deal. The group’s president Tom Still, who served for 11 years as associate editor of the Wisconsin State Journal, writes a weekly column for the Journal Sentinel. Still wrote an Op Ed saying the state should be happy just to be considered by Foxconn, set the stage for Foxconn getting a good deal by noting other states may dig deeper into their pockets than Wisconsin, reported all the officials and politicians who support the deal and none of the opponents, and has been quoted saying the $3 billion subsidy is still a good deal if Foxconn creates only 10,000 jobs rather than the 13,000 that’s been touted. The media frequently quotes Still as an expert on the Foxconn deal without ever noting his group is an unabashed supporter.

As for the report itself, Murphy notes that Williams claimed the Fox-con would add even more jobs than the rosy assumptions given by Foxconn's own consultant.

Williams at first inflated the number of jobs spun off by the deal by 13,000, as he admitted to the Journal Sentinel. Even after the figure was corrected, Williams comes up with an even bigger economic impact from the Foxconn deal than the company, EY, hired by Foxconn to provide the best-case analysis. The non-partisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau has cautioned that the EY data on the spin-off jobs is “speculative,” but Williams ups the estimate even further.

Williams asserts that Foxconn will assuredly be creating far more than the minimum 3,000 jobs because its capital investment of $10 billion is so high, but ignores the fact the deal offers no assurance Foxconn will actually invest the $10 billion and no penalty if it doesn’t. Similarly he notes that Foxconn plans to run the plan longer than 15 years, thus increasing the value of the deal, without noting there is no guarantee this will happen or penalty if it doesn’t.

And let's not forget that the "3,000 jobs" is the amount of people who would be employed at the Foxconn plant after it opens (if it ever does). That has nothing to do with jobs that are related to the construction of the facility. Those construction jobs are accounted for separately in the LFB's anaysis of job impacts, and not mentioning that is an intentional bait-and-switch - a common trick for a GOP hack like Williams.

That's proof enough that Williams will say anything as long as it gets his name in the paper and gets himself paid, but Pat Schneider of the Capital Times gave us even more insight today as to why Williams is such a blatant scammer. Because right-wing oligarchs are using him to embed their bullshit ideology onto the UW-Madison campus.

Professor Noah Williams is director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy, established in July. It operates out of the Social Sciences Building, 1180 Observatory Dr.

Funding for the center includes $240,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation and $100,000 from the Bradley Foundation, according to a proposal for the center approved in March by the UW-Madison College of Letters and Science’s Academic Planning Council.

It ain't just ads at Badger games

This is something that the Kochs and Bradleys have done at campuses around America, as part of an agenda to slant university research and create "alternative facts" that confuse the average dope into not understanding what a failure trickle-down economics and other right-wing policies really are. And the code words in the new CROWE center are obvious to those of us who have paid attention to this ugly, scummy agenda to hurt public research institutions.

The issue of political influence was addressed in the center’s founding proposal. “The principles of academic freedom and lively internal departmental debate about the quality and integrity of the research and activities supported by those funds would insulate the work from political influence,” it read. ( you know, because the donors aren't doing this for political reasons whatsoever., and would NEVER harm the integrity of what CROWE releases to the public).

The mission of CROWE is to “provide objective economic research to support economic development and policy evaluation for important state-level issues,” according to the proposal. The center will “provide a crucial link in tying the UW to the broader policy and business community statewide, expanding the outreach from academic research to practical application,” the proposal said.

"tying the UW to the broader policy and business community" ? Guess you won't be hearing much from CROWE about the correlation over the last 30 years between lower unionization and lower real wages for everyday workers. Nor will you see much about lower capital gains taxes sand lower tax rates on the rich leading to 1920s levels of economic inequality in America today, will ya?

Anyone who ever quotes Noah Williams' "findings" without saying the words "what a lying sack of shit" should be laughed out of anuy kind of serious discussion. But that kind of fact-blurring and Koched-up placement of right-wing hacks in academia is what we've sadly come to expect in the post- Citizens United world, and is part of an overall strategy to defund and deform public universities to keep them from giving inconvenient truths to the average citizen. This was accurately described in the excellent documentary "Starving the Beast."