Wisconsin has negotiated a dramatically scaled-back deal with Foxconn

Desalination costs less than 0.1 cents per liter, so that sets a pretty firm price cap on the cost of water.

Meanwhile, people at large don't follow progress of these endeavors. Some journalists may but there's selection bias from the journalist and the news consumer as to what they ultimately see and stay informed of. These stunts are forgotten by most (myself included) in the daily scramble of things we have to keep track of and manage. Did it fail? Did it succeed? Do I even remember it or just the emotion it attributed to something else I actually do remember?

Ambiguity hiding in complexity of daily life lets people say and do a lot of things and get away with it. It's often far too difficult and time consuming to unravel the ambiguity and complexity to show if something succeded, failed, or to even have cognitive capacity to keep track of. The end result, as you point out, is political capital people walk away with. The emotional impression at the time is what was sold and stuck to most people. "MAGA", "bringing back manufacturering", links to nostalgic economic golden eras for many workers.

Calling it a 5-fold, 10-fold or 20-fold decrease makes the difference between them much more immediately obvious, IMO.

Its similar with the miles/gallon vs. liters/100km metrics for fuel consumption, where one of them just seems immediately more intuitive to grasp and use (to me).

It's just like how saying something is "95% effective" sounds very convincing until you realize that's a 1-in-20 failure rate.

This is especially evident in the mental gymnastics required to understand retail sales pricing. How good is a "Buy two, get one 50% off!!" deal? Brains easily give up on the hard questions and substitute easy answers. "What's it actually worth? Bought one at another store last month, do difficult pricing history memory, or easy answer, the original price is listed right there. How good is the deal? Complicated math, or easy answer, it's at least a good enough deal to merit a big sign, bright colors, and two exclamation points. And it's good for a limited time only? Better not miss out, buy now!"

Here, the scope of the reduction is kind of irrelevant. They basically scrapped the old deal and tried to write a new, smaller one. Had they scrapped the megafactory plans and decided to open a fast food franchise it could have been reduced a million fold!

The new agreement offers $80M and asks Foxconn to spend only $672M on a factory that will employ only 1,454 people by 2025. The original deal offered Foxconn $2.85B (or $2850M) to spend $10B ($10000M) and hire 13,000 by 2032. Big numbers are hard, but running the math it's now $55k/job and $0.13/dollar of capital investment, it was $220k/job and $0.285/dollar. $80M is 2.8% or a 30-fold reduction from $2.85B, but the full story is they've simultaneously reduced the ratios of the incentives and the scope of the required investment.

A complete understanding of what those numbers mean is really hard to develop, and isn't really distilled by a substitution in the headline of 30-fold to 30x. Human brains in general are busy and don't like to work too hard, and whether we use "30 fold" like "four score" in our daily vernacular or they say 97% and 80, the headline's effect is the same. It conveys to readers who don't want to run all the numbers about average salaries and payroll taxes and capital depreciation and so on that the previous administration tried to offer an excessively generous deal but the current government has rolled that back to something a lot smaller, don't worry about exactly how much but just trust that it's a lot.