Think about what America was like in 1970, the year the E.P.A. was founded. It was still an industrial nation, with roughly a quarter of the work force employed in manufacturing, often at relatively high wages, in large part because of a still-strong union movement. (Funny how Trumpist pledges to bring back the good old days never mention that part.)
Using Donald Trump’s Tough Talk to Create Real Jobs
Mr. Trump in his presidential campaign said we needed at least $500 billion in new infrastructure investment. America’s civil engineers would like seven times that.
.. Attaching “buy American” preferences on material would greatly help the economy and would spare us national embarrassments, like the use of Chinese steel on the recently rebuilt San Franciso-Oakland Bay Bridge.
The Carrier Deal and Trump’s Challenge to Democrats
the public’s attitude toward big businesses and their chief executives was extremely negative. Just twenty per cent of Americans, Greenberg explained, had a positive opinion of C.E.O.s. Many people regarded the country’s top executives as members of a self-enriching élite, which lines its pockets by cutting wages and shifting jobs overseas.
.. “We thought we were running against trickle-down. We now find ourselves running against a nationalist message focussed on making work for people.”
.. Last week, its chief executive, Louis Chenevert, left the company with a retirement package worth a hundred and seventy-two million dollars, most of it in stock and options.
.. shutting it down and moving production to Monterrey, where workers earn about fifty dollars a week, would have juiced United Technologies’ earnings a bit. That, in turn, could have given a boost to the firm’s stock price—and further enriched the huge remuneration packages enjoyed by Chenevert and other top executives.
.. Carrier, however, is still planning to relocate six hundred jobs from the Indianapolis plant to Mexico, plus seven hundred jobs from a second plant in Huntington, Indiana, which will be shut down. Taking the two plants together, more jobs will go than will be saved.
.. “The free market has been sorting it out and America’s been losing,”
.. In his 2012 State of the Union speech, President Obama proposed a series of measures designed to discourage outsourcing. They included eliminating the tax deductions that companies can take when they shift jobs abroad, and expanding tax breaks for investment in domestic manufacturing.
.. the Obama Administration never suggested that it would be possible, or even beneficial, to stop offshoring entirely. Instead, it stressed the need to educate the workforce; develop industries of the future, such as clean energy; and retrain displaced manufacturing workers.
.. since the start of 2009, when Obama took office, the economy has created more than eight hundred thousand manufacturing jobs.
Trump Warns that Companies Shipping Jobs Oversees Will be Slapped with Enormous Bribes
President-elect Donald J. Trump drew a line in the sand on Friday as he warned that U.S. companies planning to ship jobs overseas will be slapped with enormous bribes.
“If you think you’re going to get away with sending jobs out of the U.S., think again,” Trump said. “You are about to be bribed, big league.”