Ebonhawke

Of course blackmail will work, in fact, Trump has already started the blackmailing.

“They’re going to spend a lot of money on the plant and I said to some of the folks, I said companies are not going to leave the United States anymore without consequences,” Trump said at Carrier Corporation’s gas furnace factory in Indianapolis after greeting workers. “Not going to happen.”

Also remember that Trump has said repeatedly that he feels a company has a fiduciary responsibility to maximize revenues for its' shareholders. Of course, then he was talking about the Trump Organization.

RoadWarriorFromLP

The feds didn't get involved with this one, either. The incentives came from Indiana.

You just love to complain about the Mexicans, don't you?

Unlike China, the US is a federal republic with considerable state autonomy. It's up to the states to pick and choose most of these battles, and states, counties and cities often compete against each other for business. It isn't just about foreign countries.

In any case, where is the money supposed to come from? How is Obama supposed to provide incentives when they haven't been budgeted or approved by the legislature?

dakota44

Can people just acknowledge that Carriers planned move to Mexico was just plain greed.

"Last year, Carrier produced a significant chunk of total profits for its parent company, United Technologies. Of $7.6 billion in earnings in 2015, $2.9 billion came from the Climate, Controls & Security division, where Carrier resides. Profits from this division have expanded steadily in recent years, which is not what you’d expect from a unit desperate to cut labor costs."

Snapshot of a broken system: How a profitable company justifies laying off 1,400 people & moved their jobs to Mexico - Salon.com

Most of these moves are to pad CEO bank accounts. They often have lucrative stock options which makes it in their best interest to screw the workers.

Ebonhawke

Of course it's greed, the corporate system, and processes within that system have been set up to maximize profits for the shareholders (which has a high degree of overlap with those that set up the system in the first place). Tweaking processes and parameters (such as tax rates) in the system are unlikely to produce sustainable, tangible improvements for those people who don't meet the shareholder definition.

In order to drive behaviours that will produce improvements for workers and customers, you have to radically change the system. Because a large percentage of the people that have the authority/ability to change the system are the ones directly benefiting from the current system, it becomes very difficult to initiate that change, because it means they will be negatively impacting themselves.

Even if there are catastrophic events that may cause elements of the system to try and change direction, it's difficult to sustain. The Dodd-Frank legislation is one example. This was legislation put in place to try to prevent another global financial crisis like that created in 2008 by the financial industry. Not even a decade later, the Trump administration (heavily loaded with financial executives) has said they will repeal Dodd-Frank, essentially saying "Trust us, we won't do it again"

johnwoo

Purely symbolic, Hundreds of thousands of job are gained or lost each month.
Can we expect to see Trump visit every company that intends to move jobs overseas?
Will we soon be seeing iPhones and iPads manufactured in the USA?
If Obama had done the same, the Republicans would have screamed bloody murder, because no matter what he did, they were agin it.

Giantaxe

And, as Bernie Sanders said today:

“He has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives”.

johnwoo

At the present time he has no authority to do anything. So we will see.

Ebonhawke

Trump had a quote today about making things 'very very difficult' for companies to move jobs out of the USA via high tariffs on subsequent imported goods from that company. If enacted, this will possibly mean that companies will not even take the risk of setting up a manufacturing operation in the United States because should they close a plant, it could have future financial risk - so why take that risk at all? This would potentially harm job creation in the United States especially in emerging and innovation sectors that can have a high failure rate.

Of course, this could just be an off-the-cuff remark (he apparently doesn't remember all the things that he's promised - including keeping the Carrier jobs in Indiana) but...

johnwoo

I worked for IBM and saw it's consumer electronics business decline to nothing.
The San Jose Plant the last time I went by, had been demolished, I expect it's all Condos by now. The same can be said for other companies like H-P. Consumer electronics cannot be made it this country at a price people are willing to pay. The public it would seem are prepared to pay more for pair of jeans than a computer Hard Drive.

dc koop

Well what exactly would you suggest to stop American jobs going south or overseas ? This is the country where you live, where your kids will live and make their future. I'm not a believer in open borders either

As for Mexico maybe we should just invade it, send in the Marines and Special Forces to wipe out the drug cartels, throw the corrupt politicians in jail and make it a US Territory on the same scale as Puerto Rica or the US Virgin Islands.

dc koop

Yeah well I like Bernie but no one ever heard either from he or Hillary what exactly their plan was to keep jobs from going overseas.

I don't think Hillary even mentioned the subject as her campaign was on the defensive against Trump most of the time,

dc koop

All the more sad that the government and one administration after another allow this to continue. Didn't Obama declare after election that he would stop lobbying which is corruption and bribery by any other name. It's still going on though

Ebonhawke

In one of the debates, she talked about trying to change the economic dynamic from trickle-down to building from the middle, but didn't really expound on details (may have been on her website but)

Giantaxe

Shouldn't companies be able to manufacture wherever they choose?

Of course the flip side to not setting up factories in Mexico is that it will increase the likelihood of illegal immigration from that country. It is very much in the US's interests that Mexico develops economically instead of being treated as a pariah.

Lobbying is constitutionally protected free speech.

scrubbedexpat099

Then the factories would need to relocate?