I own stock in an American air conditioning manufacturer that competes directly with Carrier. Now they compete with a $7 million disadvantage. Thanks, Trump.
Those workers would have been better off if they just gave them the money.
I think the instantaneous “let me find a way to say this is BAD” reaction only hurts us Democrats. It makes us look like sore losers who can’t even grudgingly acknowledge even a tiny bit of evidence that Trump succeeded at anything.
My guess is that whatever the deal was, it is not something that can be done on a large scale without consequences, in the form of higher prices for goods, reduced competitiveness, increased deficit, etc. However, the fact is that Trump said he’d keep jobs in the US and, in however unsustainable or imperfect a fashion, he just kept a few in the US. Okay fine - I’m happy for the Carrier employees whose jobs were saved.
And for the moment, that’s it. Let’s see how Trump does when he is responsible for guiding the nation. I’ll save my nay-saying for when and if his failure comes. Right now, the only gracious response is, “I’m happy for the people whose jobs are saved. Trump made an example of Carrier during his campaign and he has indeed kept some jobs in the US, just as he promised. If Trump can repeat what he just did with Carrier on a macro scale, without incurring unacceptable side-effects, then he will have kept his campaign promises and we should all be very pleased with the prosperity we will experience.”
He said he would bring jobs back. He not only failed at that, he failed at saving all the jobs.
He failed to severely punish companies that sent jobs out of country, instead, he(or rather Pence, these were all state level incentives) gave them tax breaks to keep jobs here.
Plus, some of the jobs he’s touting as saving, were never on the block to begin with.
Note ThelmaLou’s link in post 78.
I’m holding him to the standard he set and that he judged others by.
he can’t have failed, because he isn’t President yet. He can’t implement his tariff plan until he takes office. He can also actually enforce H1B regulations, which will open up hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs overnight. We are like 10X over the legal cap.
He is using the powers he will have when he is sworn in. Carrier would have never dealt with a private citizen in this matter.
And he was quite the enthusiastic user of H1B.
I badly need tone of voice here, because I want to say, “oh, come on!” But when written, these words look like I’m being seriously argumentative, which I’m not. (From your posts over the last few months, I gather that politically we are nearly perfectly aligned.) So imagine a tiny, good-natured chiding between, friends, okay?
Now: Oh, come on! So what he SHOULD have done was let the jobs be taken to Mexico, and THEN convinced Carrier to return them? Because that fits the definition of “bring jobs back” better than “don’t let jobs which WERE slated to be moved abroad actually leave in the first place”?
The plan was to move the jobs to Mexico. Now they aren’t being moved. To say that this is not “bringing jobs back” is unfair.
And to say he failed at saving all the jobs is like criticizing a president who brings the unemployment rate (in an imaginary example) from 6.3 percent down to 4.1 percent, because what about that last 4.1 percent, huh?
Disclaimer: I hate and fear Trump and am sick to my stomach that he is President. By writing this post, I am not in any way, shape or form defending Trump or celebrating what he did. I’m simply trying to fight for common sense and credibility amongst my political compatriots.
*Under Obama
The determination to find something bad to say about this is pathetic.
Carrier got a tax break. How much local, state and federal tax would Carrier have paid if they totally relocated to Mexico? Would they pledge $16,000,000 in improvements had they moved? How much income, sales and property tax would be paid by the 1100 employees if they had lost their jobs? How much would they have collected in unemployment and other benefits?
Somebody trying to down play this out of partisianship is a bitter, spiteful person who has no integrity. And I say this as somebody who distrusts Trump and didn’t vote for him. There is exactly zero difference between shooting down everything Trump does because he’s Trump and shooting down everything Obama did just because he’s Obama.
What possible rationale can you have for saying this?
Yeah, especially those Carrier workers whose jobs were just saved! And the taxpayers of Indiana, of course, who will be footing the bill for the nice $7 million state tax incentive Carrier received as part of the deal.
We don’t even know, for sure, if the $7 million is the sum total of the incentives promised, nor do we know what the improvements really will be. For example, 300 of the jobs for which Carrier is now getting a tax break are jobs they were not planning to move to Mexico in the first place. What other details are going to leak about the deal in the coming days and weeks and months?
If Trump is going to spend the next (four|eight) years picking winners and losers, deciding which businesses and which employees are “worth” saving and which ones get left to sink or swim on their own, it would be nice if he’d come out and say what his criteria are. He ran against the entire idea that government was even marginally competent at picking winners, though, so a complete repudiation of one of his core planks before he has even taken office is kind of a big deal.
If those 800 had lost their jobs, they might have found new jobs that didn’t require government support, or they might not. We don’t know, so we really can’t answer how much they would have been paying under some alternate scenario. We do know, however, that they and every other Indiana taxpayer is going to be paying a little bit more to cover the cost of these incentives, because the state of Indiana still needs to fund its schools, health inspectors, prisons, police, etc., etc., etc. Carrier will be paying less, so others have to pay more.
I think that giving a reprieve to some 1000 workers in the Carrier plant is a good thing. I’m sure I’d feel a sense of relief if I was one of those workers.
But it’s important to keep in mind that there are at least that many other Carrier jobs that are still going to be moved to Mexico. Nothing is being done to stop that and nothing can be done to make them return using this particular approach by the Trump administration.
Additionally, we don’t yet know if these jobs got a permanent stay of execution or if they will be gone a year, two or three from now.
So while we should give credit when credit is due, we should not be breathing a huge sigh of relief, nor should we lose sight of the fact that this is just a band-aid solution to a problem for which we’ve not heard a comprehensive policy from the incoming administration.
I’m just happy to see Republican’s rooting for higher paying union jobs for a change.
We also don’t know if the jobs compensation will stay the same, along with normal COL adjustments, or if their pay and benefits will be slashed. May not be as great a reprieve as some were looking for.
Agreed. It’s a simplistic and short sighted solution that is creating more problems than it solves. But it’s read meat for the Trump believers and the last meal is as far as they’re able to think.
It will all end in tears when the red meat supply begins to run out. Get ready for the howls of disappointment.
Or it could be that some people see through your lame gotcha of a thread and simply refuse to play along. It’s a conundrum.
How much would have been paid in taxes if Carrier moved and those 1100 peope were laid off?
It been publicly anounced Carrier will get $7,000,000 in tax breaks while pledging $16,000,000 in improvements to a plant that was going to be shut down. They’re also dedicated to keeping those jobs for at least ten years.
Had Carrier left they would have paid no taxes. Many of those 1100 would have received unemployment and other benefits.
No matter how you spin it, this is good economic news for Indiana.
Only in the sense of “We only need to amputate one of your legs, not both.”
Maybe it’d be nice if Indiana got to keep both legs?