I see the point, but it’s hard to imagine a situation where these 1,000 jobs would come with the quid pro quo of cutting 1,000 jobs elsewhere. But that may well be an unintended consequence of the deal made.
The Cheeto is off to a good start. Caves in on his first deal, allows jobs to leave the country and even fails to consider the effects of the deal he made.
Sound real similar to the criticism he leveled at Obama.
It’s worth noting that dude’s not even president yet. Not that I expect him to save a ton of jobs once he is, but it is pertinent.
Then he has no business negotiating with any company.
If he’s doing so based on the fact that he will be in office, then he should do the deal the same as if he already is.
Face it, his first deal and he already discarded the whole jobs platform he ran on.
So he promises(and gets elected) on saving jobs and you don’t care if he doesn’t?
Not really, I didn’t vote for him. Just curious if the trained seals that populate this forum would shoot down unambiguous good news. You’ve lived up to expectations.
OK, just beyond criticism on this particular point, it would seem from your posts here.
Sorry, what’s “my side” doing, exactly? Who is “my side”? Is this a football match?
I said right there that I “could only hope to emulate your admirable lack of bias where Mr. Trump is concerned”. Sorry if I seem sarcastic to you, I have many failings. Like Mr. Trump.
Don’t think of it as “saving jobs”. Think of it as “artificially keeping labour costs high”. Alternatively, public subsidy of private industry.
This is like the worst way of providing welfare possible. Want to create jobs, create real value? Encourage spending and investment. The one thing that I really agree with Trump on, spending on infrastructure, I haven’t heard a peep about. Or rather, what I’ve heard is garbage.
So no, “saving jobs” is not a good thing. It is rarely a good thing, particularly where the company in question puts out a tweet saying “we got a good deal”.
Without knowing the details of the agreement, it’s hard to say if the news is unambiguously good. Why do you assume it is? Whose fish are you barking for?
I applaud your complete lack of bias in the matter. The percentage of workers who don’t lose their jobs to overseas outsourcing will be chanting your name.
Okay, so what did they give Carrier to keep them there?
Keeping jobs is great, but there is a point at which the cost outweighs the benefits.
Yeah, I’m wondering what kind of “deal” there is here.
Besides, it’s not the President’s job to tell companies they have to stay here. His job is to create incentives over the entire economy, such as slapping tariffs on US companies’ products who ship from Mexico.
OK, so you apparently are saying that this isn’t about the Carrier deal at all, it’s some fiendishly clever ‘gotcha’ to demonstrate once and for all…well, some vague point about hypocrisy, I guess. Is there some reason you can’t just come out and say in the OP what your intentions are, rather than posting a fake concern like that?
Meanwhile, despite your not having voted for Trump, you seems to have some sort of issue with other SDMB posters for…not voting for Trump. What’s up with that?
Without knowing what incentives Carrier got, we have no idea if this was good or not.
There’s no reasonable doubt the move was in response to Trump making an issue of it. To deny that is to show obvious bias.
The actual question is whether it’s in the common good in the long run for politicians to pressure and interfere with investment decisions in this way. If Carrier didn’t believe it was economically viable to keep the operation in question, or all parts of it, in IN there’s no reason to think that has changed. Thus Carrier will have a less competitive manufacturing operation for the particular products or stages of production in question, and that can be expected to drag down Carrier’s competitiveness in general, and eventually endanger jobs in other Carrier operations in the US. Ie, foreign makers competing directly with Carrier aren’t being forced to produce their products for the North American market in a particular place.
It’s the same basic inductive logic populist/protectionists always ignore. If you demand Caterpillar buy US made steel but it’s more expensive than the world priced steel say Kubota or Hyundai or another construction equipment manufacturer overseas is allowed to buy, that eventually costs jobs at Caterpillar. Then you ‘fix’ that by telling people in the US they must buy Caterpillar not Kubota…and drag down the competitiveness of the product or service they produce compared overseas competitors allowed to seek the best value. Both economic theory and empirical evidence say those knock on effects usually outweigh the jobs ‘saved’ at the first stage of the line of domino’s. Often many times over.
The populist left and right now agree on protectionist/merchantalist polices, and are both wrong.
One particular ‘show’ case of this kind is trivial either way. But if you expand this type of policy it will be destructive.
I’m very much a free trader, but when various players find hacks so to speak that cause major problems in the economy, something has to be done. For decades I’ve defended the idea of free trade, but just too many companies have either imported cheap labor and fired American workers, outsourced whole divisions entirely, or even shuttered American plants and reopened in a third world country to ship those product into the US nearly tariff-free.
Now all that can still be defended on an economics basis, but at some point the losers in this system get so numerous and so angry that a democracy can no longer brush aside their concerns. I’m not going to say that companies have to buy American or manufacture everything in America, but they do need to stop looking for cheap shortcuts like closing their plant and transferring operations to Mexico and then importing the vast bulk of what those factories make back into the US. That gravy train needs to end and I know of no other country that tolerates it.
I have no patience for some of the proposed protectionist measures that get bandied about, but the most egregrious abuses need to be curtailed. American workers should not be training their foreign replacements.
Why should they have gotten any incentives at all?
This is the typical line from ‘reformed’ former free trade advocates. And it has political merit. However it doesn’t address the actual economics. IOW the problem is finding a set of actual policies which substantially change the flow of jobs/investment without a disproportionate cost. IOW ‘can still be defended on an economic basis’ is a huge ‘but’ that’s pretty uniformly ignored in economically illiterate pundit pieces by conservatives (not calling you one if you don’t want, but nothing wrong with it, to me, if you consider yourself so) ‘coming around’ to the populist position on trade.
The most likely political outcome IMO is some show piece confrontations with companies/countries and not much macro change. That’s nothing new. We know of the extremely high cost of ‘saved’ jobs in eg. steel because of previous symbolic protectionist actions as experiments to study. Or at least we can hope for symbolic rather than truly destructive protectionism, and ‘political reality’ aside, somebody has to show on the ‘only economics’ side there’s any other option. Which there isn’t at this point (big toothpaste out of tube factors also). That’s speaking of protectionist solutions, not including actions like tax policy, training policy, wage insurance/subsidy etc.
Also on same theme of ‘focus on the big picture and don’t get distracted by the actual economics of economic policies’ 
free trade is a relatively minor reason for employment/income realignments. In some specific cases of course it really is the issue and in particular regions, not whole swaths of the country as sometimes claimed, but limited ones, it also is.
THIS is what bothers me about the whole thing. Trump ran on a platform of “anti corruption”. Well how do people think corruption happens? Politicians cherry-picking which companies to offer “deals” to.
Unfortunately that is all Trump knows - making “deals”. That’s not the job of the President.
The problem is, people are dumb as shit and don’t understand economics. So they can’t see how moving the big levers benefits or hurts the economy as a whole. What they see are a hundred jobs here or a thousand jobs there saved or lost at one factory. Which in the grand scheme of the economy is irrelevant.
Protecting companies and workers from foreign competition has always been a bad idea. If steel is made better and cheaper elsewhere, and Americans prefer to buy the foreign steel, then American steel is just screwed. Also, these types of trade problems are generally not caused by companies being greedy, they are caused by companies being unwilling to change and get better, and so they demand protection so they can keep on sucking.
But American worker competition with foreign labor on a direct cost basis is not an issue that Americans can resolve by just being better workers. IMO, foreign competition should be thus: Toyota makes cars. Ford makes cars. If American consumers prefer Toyotas, then more power to Toyota and nice knowing you, Ford. What foreign competition should not be is: Americans like Disney, but American workers are expensive so Disney replaces those workers with foreign workers who are cheaper. What’s worse, they do it in a fashion that gets around the spirit and intent of the law.
Here’s the thing though. Countries do understand their national interests pretty well. If Trump leaves NAFTA, Canada has said they have no interest in keeping free trade with Mexico. They aren’t stupid. NAFTA is a win for Canada and Mexico because most of their exports are to us and it accounts for a large portion of their economy. Free trade between Canada and Mexico is still good for Mexico, but not so much for Canada. Canada would drop out, and rightfully so. Now again, a solid economic argument can be made for Canada and Mexico having free trade with each other without the US, but Canada won’t do it because the benefits would be relatively small and diffuse(slightly cheaper prices throughout the Canadian economy) while the losers were high profile and angry(factories shuttered and moved to Mexico).
I support NAFTA, but we do need one change, because there is a situation that no one(well, at least not the US and Canada) intended: companies moving operations to Mexico. So it’s entirely reasonable to tell companies in the US that they are free to move to Mexico, but there will be no cost savings for doing so. Your goods will have tariffs slapped on them. it’s a small change that admittedely will have a small impact, but it will have a big impact on avoiding all those shitty headlines about factories moving to third world countries.