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Trump already making America great again- gets Carrier to keep jobs in IN


Carrie Mathison
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From the topic title- Carrier plant will keep jobs in Indiana instead of outsourcing to Mexico. This just after South Korean companies, such as auto manufacturers and chemical firms, are expected to move production to the US to avoid the tariff. And then it was widely reported that Trump is directly pushing Apple to move production into the US; something that Apple is now considering. Can we honestly imagine Clinton (or any other Republican) actually trying to do anything about this? Nah, probably just lean back in the chair with a satisfied grin and... "f-ck em."

 

Of course, the Dow Jones has been going bonkers as well... up almost 1000 points since election day.

 

This on the heels of:

 

-Hilariously ambushing the media and telling them off in a "firing squad," calling them out personally for biased election coverage... doing all of us a service by finally lifting the curtain on these shenanigans;

 

-Completely short-cutting the media and just going straight to people on Twitter; often sending the Left into straight off-the-rails unhinged crazy mode (see this morning's tweet about flag burning... just... absolutely... master trolling from the Don);

 

-Appointing an Attorney General that appears to have an interest in enforcing the law, especially immigration law;

 

-Providing us some of the best entertainment on TV in years in watching the complete hyperventilation of the Left... the PC thought-police in retreat for the first time in... well, pretty much my entire lifetime for sure;

 

-Appointing a National Security Advisor that actually has the balls to call Islam a "political ideology" that has "metastasized into a malignant cancer."

 

 

Just... god damn. Guy isn't in office yet, and it hasn't even been a month, and he's already making America great again. This keeps on for 4 years and it's gonna be like a glorious return to the 80s.

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Impeachment? Resignation? Or just becoming a puppet?

assassination - the secret service did not have a stellar record during the Obama years.

 

I wasn't gonna suggest that since it seems a bit.... morbid.

 

Also, unlikely. We just had 8 years with no incident, and as the Left seems to think, at least half this country are irredeemable racists, so shouldn't something have happened?

 

Unless of course, you think left-wing ideologues are more violent and fanatical than the right-wing ones. You sorta walked right into that one Spam.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

Oh Jeeze, a lot of that stuff was in the works and would have happened by the actions of companies involved, regardless who was elected. Trump is just doing what most presidents to: claiming credit for which they had little to nothing to do with. Last time I checked, it was congress that votes on tariffs. Not the president.

 

And as for short cutting the press, while I think we all like to see reporters get knocked down a few pegs, to me that just comes off as petty and beneath the office of POTUS. Sets a bad precedent, and isn't very transparent. People will eat it up for a while, but like it did for Rumsfeld, if there is even a perception of impropriety in the Trump Administration (and you know there will be), the cutesy "tell off the reporter" rants Trump loves to have, will backfire and start to piss people off.

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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

 

So basically, you are now defending Wal Mart? This is basically the same argument Fox News and talk radio used to use for outsourcing and wanting to bring in cheap labor from Latin America during the Bush years.

 

I am definitely not a Trump supporter by far, nor am I defending him here because I don't buy the argument he is responsible for much or any of what these news articles are describing. I'm loathe to say it, but on the issue of retaining jobs in the US, and trying to bring back production to the US, I actually agree with Trump on some issues when it comes to jobs. I do think we have de-industrialized too much, and if, for example there is a way to bring the auto industry back to Detroit, Ohio, or other rust belt ghost towns, even if that is now Kia instead of Chevrolet, then it's a good thing.

 

Ten years ago, it was the Dems who were saying this, and it was the GOP supporting outsourcing to overseas nations like China and India, and supporting, and even praising, corporations that did it for their business acumen. I mean wasn't there a call all through he Bush years, and during Occupy Wall Street to take the obscene tens to hundreds of millions in golden parachute money out of the pockets of executives and put it in the hands of the workers? It's just a shame that it took Trump to argue a point that used to be one fought for by Democrats.

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The main point of that article is that keeping production in the US will increase the price of those goods, since labor is so much more expensive here. The goods then become noncompetitive and these businesses eventually shut down anyway.

 

It's a fair point but there's an easy solution: pass a tariff. Deals like this ultimately do require some type of accompanying mechanism, like a tariff, to work properly. That's why I've been stressing that one of Trump's #1 priorities has got to be trade. Democrats have already expressed interest in working on a bipartisan trade deal- this could be an easy political win for Trump early. If only he doesn't get distracted by something like repealing Obamacare, which can wait.

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Yes, I think this is a win beyond the saved jobs. No, the number of jobs themselves isn't particularly significant. In fact, all of this has a bit of a propogandistic element to it, which isn't lost on me. One factory staying the US, is not exactly the same as the Rust Belt re-emerging. Particularly when, as may be the case, this plant moves anyway (just in 5 years instead of now).

 

So yeah, to some degree this is largely symbolic. But this is why it's still a win- it sends a strong, immediate signal, as to the type of issues Trump is going to put priority on. Which, at the end of the day, when we strip away all the campaign bluster and bullsh-t about how Trump was Hitler and what not.. that was ultimately what Trump campaigned on and promised. That he'd bring back jobs and make deals. Here we are, just 3 weeks after the election, and he's already made his first deal.

 

Now, maybe Trump ends up being a success, or perhaps he's an absolute failure. But it's refreshing to see a president that at least pretends to give a sh-t about American workers and is at least going to try and fight for some of these people. Normally I'd suspect this whole thing is a charade, and with 90% of Trump's issues, it is a charade. But trade is the one thing, really the only thing, that Trump has been consistent on for decades- he has always been a nationalist and you can go back to interviews with him in the 80s where he's saying the same thing. Hearing him talk today, you can tell that it is something that he actually cares about.

 

So maybe he'll fail, who knows, but like I said, it's nice to see someone at least make an attempt, as opposed to just looking at our country's descent into third-world status, shrugging one's shoulders and saying "ehh... f-ck em."

 

As to whether it's a political win, well it certainly is (there's no way to spin it negatively, really), and that's one reason why I'm harping on Trump pushing trade as his big agenda item out of the gate.

 

As to whether I think anti-trade, in general, is a "win," or more broadly speaking, a good idea.. well that's a much longer post. Over a decade ago, I was once a mild libertarian (this was mainly in reaction to my leftist professors and also, a sorta adolescent feeling of superiority over people poorer than I, a group that was larger than I realized growing up, since I was pretty sheltered). Gradually this shifted to more centrist beliefs in line with the moderate wing of the GOP as I grew older and became more practical, and then finally, I started becoming significantly more nationalist and protectionist. Which, come to think of it, is the more traditionally conservative stance (the GOP was historically very pro-tariff and their fetish with free markets didn't really take hold until the Reagan years). Why this transformation happened in me is again, a much longer post, but I guess it has to do with me becoming older and caring a great deal more about the national interest (and realizing that neither party was really advocating for policies in the national interest). Maybe living in Europe for several years made me start caring about this more, I don't know. Maybe I just realized that Dems/GOP bickering over whether the capital gains rate should be 20% or 15% is not particularly important compared to the preservation of American culture and society. Who knows, but there you have it.

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This just seems like Carrier leveraged a thousand of its workers in order to secure a sweet deal. So, basically, taxpayers are now left paying the salaries of these workers? In his campaign he said he was going to essentially create downsides if these companies threatened to leave. Now he's just showering them with promised benefits on top of their already large profit margins. Am I missing something here?

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Yeah, you're missing that those workers make more than $875 a year, which is the projected cost ($7,000,000 over 10 years) @ 800 jobs. I've seen anywhere from 700-1000 listed, so we'll say 700 jobs. Heck, lets go really low and say 500 jobs. That's $1,400 per year, coming from the state of Indiana. The cost of losing those jobs would far exceed that cost.

Sometimes it makes sense to play hard ball, sometimes it makes sense to just sit down and do the math and say "This is a way better deal for us."

http://www.wsj.com/articles/indiana-gives-7-million-in-tax-breaks-to-keep-carrier-jobs-1480608461

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-carrier-deal-2016-12

 

 

 

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I agree Brando, but I do think that Brett has a point (whether he intended to make it, or just stumbled upon it) that in the long run, simple taxpayer subsidies can be unsustainable. That was the central point of the article MG linked to as well- in other words, it ultimately decreases the competitiveness of those goods while giving people a temporary payday.

 

That is why the carrot has to be accompanied by the stick. Trump knows this as well- on the campaign trail he's talked about imposing steep tariffs on Mexico and China. That's a key ingredient to this economic strategy; and again, Trump knows this.. but whether he can get Congress to go along with passing something like that is another story.

 

If he can, awesome. If he can't, then yeah... these are band-aids that will fall apart eventually, but I still give the man credit for at least trying (see my post above).

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Eh, Carrier will still have to lay off some workers, plus the future is robots. Eventually a few workers will just be minding robots doing all the tasks. Trump is right though that people will flock to buy Carrier A/C units.

 

I wonder though about this. Will Trumps administration personally work with every business considering leaving the country to make products elsewhere to work deals with individual customizable plans?

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That might be true, but I still don't understand what your criticism is.

 

A 50 year old dude working at Carrier with no education beyond HS that already has several kids isn't going "back to school" to learn something else. In the latter years of his life he isn't going to suddenly morph into some wizard programmer that can compete with millennials and land a six-figure job at Google. So let's cut the sh-t and how bout some real talk. What exactly are we supposed to do with this guy, just tell him to "go f-ck himself?"

 

I'm not precisely sure what your point is Spam.

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From the Business Insider article:

"But the key question is not whether President Trump will be able to bully or bribe individual companies to create jobs or whether he can get a good price on the bribes.
It's whether he can sufficiently change tax, trade, and regulatory policies to change the calculus so companies no longer want to offshore, whether he creates a new norm in which companies locate jobs in the US because they fear government or public backlash if they do not."
Again, "sufficiently changing tax/trade/regulatory policies". Carrier was relieved of a normal expense. It's a handout, plain and simple. The government (and eventually the taxpayer) will be footing the bill for those workers to keep their jobs. These weren't new, created jobs, these workers aren't suddenly going to generate new spending or new taxes (any more than they've already been paying)
If that were the case then Carrier would have had no reason to fire them in the first place.
That article is FILLED with a lot of "Ifs". And the writer basically says, at the end, that this isn't much more than a band aid. $7 million in tax cuts is $7 million dollars regardless of where it comes from, $7 million dollars Carrier didn't previously have until it was offered to them by Trump. The revenue has to come from somewhere. This wasn't an example of Trump relieving some poor, overtaxed corporation either. What exactly is the downside of a "bribe" for the one being bribed? (beyond ethical concerns) If Trump continues this tactic businesses will just keep receiving (corporate handouts/corporate welfare), and leveraging MORE of its workers. In other words, making MORE threats in order to secure a better deal than the previous corporation's (deal) in order to stay competitive.

Where is that supposed "imposed tariff" for companies threatening to leave?
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Guest El Chalupacabra

 

I am not impressed so far.

If Trump cured cancer, you wouldn't be impressed. You're a Democrat, we get it.

 

Why did it take Trump doing this before you gave a crap about the poors and the middle class rust belt production workers? I remember threads that weren't all that long ago where you talked about eugenics and how old people need to just hurry up and die, and such. I think that is the most astonishing thing about this thread: you sound almost compassionate.

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I remember threads that weren't all that long ago where you talked about eugenics and how old people need to just hurry up and die, and such. I think that is the most astonishing thing about this thread: you sound almost compassionate.

 

Carrie used to wish that they'd hurry die quickly to decrease the surplus population and then a miracle...

 

 

And so, as the Carrier plant workers observed, God bless Us, Every One!

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