The remarks came at a factory of air-conditioning company Carrier in Indianapolis, where Trump said he had brokered a deal to keep 1,100 jobs from being outsourced to Mexico.
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To hear Donald Trump tell it, the story of how Carrier decided not to move jobs to Mexico started when the president-elect was watching the evening news about a week ago.
Trump and Pence will announce the deal at the Carrier plant on the west side of Indianapolis at 2 p.m. Thursday.
In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Even if you really want to move the jobs to Vietnam or Kenya, just say you’re looking at possible sites for a new plant in Mexico. If the extra costs of staying in Indianapolis erode that business, those workers will lose their jobs eventually in any case.
Trump has received positive publicity for making the deal, which is being seen as an “extraordinary industry intervention by a president-elect”. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing for the president to send a strong message to the workers of America that he’s going to create the environment for them to do well right here and send that same message to the corporations of America.
He spent several minutes excoriating the “extremely dishonest” news media, and mocking TV reporters who said Trump didn’t have a chance because of the blue wall of Midwestern industrial states that Clinton was expected to win. Trump on Thursday defended directly intervening with a company looking to move overseas, potentially opening the door to unprecedented corporate intervention by a sitting president. “Why wouldn’t every other company make the exact same pitch?” said Steve Weitzner of Silverlode Consulting, a site selection firm.
Some economists and Democrats have downplayed the importance of Trump’s actions.
Trump and Pence celebrated the 1,000 jobs deal at an event in Indianapolis on Thursday, but employers elsewhere in IN are laying off five times as many workers because of foreign competition.
Donald Trump launched into a post-election victory lap Thursday by visiting a company where he claimed credit for saving American jobs, as he warned other USA firms they will face consequences if relocating overseas. When they played it I said, ‘I did make it, but I didn’t mean it quite that way, ‘ ” Trump said.
On the campaign trail, Trump threatened to impose sharp tariffs on any company that shifted its factories to Mexico.
Despite Trump’s deal, employers elsewhere in IN are laying off five times that many workers because of foreign competition.
If we use Trump’s own claim that the Carrier deal is saving 1,000 jobs, for the record it is only saving 800, but for the sake of simplicity and consistency, we’ll use Trump’s number of 1,000. That’s basically the deal offered by Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, who happens to be governor of IN (and thus IN a position to offer the tax relief). “They have money. They want to go out, they want to move to another country, and because our politicians are so dumb, they want to sell their product to us and not have any retribution, not have any outcome”.
However, that remains a fraction of the $65 million a year the company would have saved had it moved the plant to Mexico, suggesting the incentives were not the only factor in its decision to stay put. Today, we learned that private employment rose by 156,000 jobs in November.
Heitkamp says in a statement she’s appreciative of the meeting and says that “whatever job I do, I hope to work with the president-elect” and her colleagues in Congress to help North Dakota.
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“In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won”.
