And he’s gonna make the faucets run ice cream, too

Trump says he’s going to “punish” companies that move their factories to places with lower wages. Yeah sure he is – right after he sells all that he has and gives to the poor.

Trump’s remarks came as he triumphantly celebrated a decision by the heating and air conditioning company Carrier to reverse its plans to close a furnace plant here and move to Mexico, helping keep 1,100 jobs in Indianapolis. About that many Carrier positions at that plant and another facility in the area will still be cut, however.

Plus Trump bribed them with tax breaks, thus providing an incentive for all other companies to threaten to run away from home unless Trump bribes them too.

In remarks delivered inside the Carrier facility, the president-elect said more companies will decide to stay in the United States because his administration will lower corporate taxes and reduce regulations.

Yay! Get ready for more pollution, more workplace injuries and deaths, more contaminated food, more bogus product claims, more workers fired for being too ugly or old or fat or all of those.

“Companies are not going to leave the United States any more without consequences,” Trump declared Thursday. “Not gonna happen. It’s not gonna happen.”

His verbal flair is such a joy.

Trump said he decided to intervene after watching a television news report that reminded him that he had vowed during the campaign, “We’re not going to let Carrier leave.”

Maybe next he’ll watch Thelma and Louise and drive off a cliff.

The Carrier deal was sharply criticized by some conservatives, who viewed it as government distortion of free markets, as well as liberals, who derided it as corporate welfare.

“I think it sets a pretty bad precedent,” said Dan Ikenson, director of the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “I don’t think we should be addressing issues like this on an ad hoc basis. It certainly incentivizes companies to make a stink and say, ‘We’re going to leave, too. What are you going to do for me?’ ”

Aw poor Republicans. They’re starting to see the downside already.

Privately, some business leaders were also unnerved.

“It is uncharted territory for a president-elect to get involved personally in social engineering with a single company,” said an adviser to major corporations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order not to anger the new administration.

Because if the adviser angered the new administration, the new administration might pull out the adviser’s fingernails.

People in Indianapolis are saying what a great guy Trump is, he keeps his promises, wotta pal.

In fact, by Trump’s own telling on Thursday, he had no plans to intervene in the Carrier case until he watched an evening news segment featuring a worker who expressed confidence that the president-elect would save the Indianapolis plant. He said his campaign vow to save the plant was “a euphemism” for other companies.

Hahahahahahaha that’s not what euphemism means oh lord he’s such a joke…until he kills us all.

Regardless, Trump — known for his tendency to react to TV news reports — said he immediately picked up the phone and called Gregory Hayes, the chief executive of Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies.

“I said, ‘Greg, you gotta help us out here. You gotta do something,’ ” Trump recalled Thursday.

I’m picturing William Macy as Jerry Lundegaard.

Standing in front of a wall blanketed with Carrier’s blue-and-white logo, Trump lavished praise on the company for its decision, promising that the sales of its air-conditioning units would soar “because of the goodwill you have engendered.”

Experts said no modern president has intervened on behalf of an individual company. While Obama stepped in to rescue car manufacturers after the 2008 financial crisis and President John F. Kennedy intervened to prevent steel producers from increasing prices, these actions affected entire industries — not decisions at a specific plant, Bartik said.

Jeff Windau, an analyst at the investment firm Edward Jones in St. Louis, said that Trump may not have the “bandwidth” to keep up this kind of deal-making once in the Oval Office.

Hahahahahaha that’s such a tactful way of putting it. No, it probably won’t work very well for him to try to schmooze every CEO he glimpses on the news, one at a time.

“Having a current president-elect focus on a specific company and a specific location — it’s a pretty micro view of the world,” he said.

But Trump said Thursday that he planned to personally call other companies contemplating moving operations out of the country, even, as he said, if critics felt such outreach was not “presidential.”

“I think it’s very presidential. And if it’s not presidential, that’s okay because I actually like doing it,” Trump said. “But we’re going to have a lot of phone calls made to companies when they say they’re leaving this country, because they’re not going to leave this country.”

“That’s okay because I actually like doing it” – of course he does, he loves calling people up, and he thinks that’s what the job is – calling the CEO of Pakistan and telling him how great he is, and calling up each CEO personally…he’s hilarious. As long as you don’t focus on the damage he’ll do.

Trump’s aggressive stance toward outsourcing comes despite the fact that his family companies profit from low-wage laborers around the globe who produce Trump-branded merchandise. His daughter Ivanka has her own separate brand of jewelry, shoes and clothing, much of which is produced in China.

But that’s completely different because…Is that a squirrel?

8 Responses to “And he’s gonna make the faucets run ice cream, too”