So this week, President-Elect Trump secured a deal with Carrier to keep about a thousand jobs in Indiana. At a cost of more than seven million dollars over several years.
This has been widely panned as showing companies how to blackmail the President into giving them tax incentives and so forth in order to keep them from going off shore. It has been treated like a bad deal, and used as another club against Trump.
Ignoring the obvious fact that the same deal from President Obama would be receiving praise, there are two points not being made that show some unpleasant sides of the press.
First, that this is not a political move, but a CEO move. Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, breaks this down far better than I can. His article sums up like so:
I’ll say this again because it’s important. We’re all watching closely to see if President Elect Trump has the skill to be president. And while you watch, Trump and Pence are pulling off one of the most skillfully executed new CEO plays you will ever see. Remember what I taught you in the past year: Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel. And when you watch Trump and Pence fight and scratch to keep jobs in this country, it changes how you will feel about them for their entire term. This is a big win for Trump/Pence disguised as a small win.
So there is that.
Second, is the arrogance to dismiss this as ‘ineffective’. I have heard claims that even if this pace continues, it will restore but 4% of the lost manufacturing jobs. And the media wonders why they are so dismissed, distrusted, and disregarded. Yes, you morons, it is a small drop. But it is a drop. It is effort on behalf of those who have been denigrated and ignored.
It’s like the annoyingly sentimental thing you see on Facebook every so often. Where the kid is throwing starfish back into the ocean, and says ‘it matters to that one’.
In other words, it matters to them. It matters to those 1000 workers who get to keep their jobs. And the next 1000. And so on. These are the same people Obama dismissed as ‘bitter clingers’, Clinton as ‘deplorable’. And that supported Trump because he at least paid lip service to believing in them. Even if this is the only 1000 jobs saved, he managed this before coming into office.
So think on that. And remember that the day when people had to turn to self-proclaimed elites is over. The truth will out, and in this case, the truth is, for 1000 families, Christmas came early, and has bad hair.