Wisconsin knows all about politicians who promise to create outrageous numbers of jobs that are made up out of thin air. When he was elected in 2010, Gov. Scott Walker promised to create 250,000 jobs in four years.
By the end of Walker’s first term, when he’d created barely 100,000 jobs, his ironclad political promise itself disappeared back into the outer reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere from whence it came.
Two years later, local media have stopped regularly reporting on Walker’s meager job creation, but Wisconsin is still unlikely to reach the 250,000 jobs he promised in his first term by the end of his second.
Political dishonesty over jobs is back with President-elect Donald Trump, who’s making even more preposterous claims about creating so many jobs that working people will get tired of winning.
Trump promises to create at least 25 million jobs to become “the greatest jobs president that God ever created” at a time when God Himself would have trouble re-creating millions of manufacturing jobs lost to robotics and rehiring millions of coalminers when fracking has made natural gas cheap and plentiful.
But a gullible news media portrayed Trump as a working-class hero anyway for his fraudulent charade last week of pretending to save jobs in Indiana by preventing a Carrier heating and air conditioning plant from moving all of its operations from Indianapolis to Mexico.
Campaigning, Trump threatened to punish Carrier if it moved jobs to Mexico with a whopping tariff as high as 25% or 35% to sell its air conditioners back in the U.S. At the celebration of Carrier’s decision to keep 1,000 jobs in Indianapolis, Trump warned that other companies moving jobs out of the U.S. could face similar punishing “consequences.”
Like the punishing consequences Carrier’s parent company United Technologies will now be forced to endure as it continues moving jobs to Mexico? Every company in America should immediately begin planning to jump on that gravy train. And they probably are.
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See, here are a few details Trump didn’t point out at that rally. Although Carrier will keep about 1,000 employees at the Indianapolis plant, it will be allowed to ship another 300 to 600 jobs from that plant to Mexico, along with another 700 jobs from a different Indiana facility.
Oh yeah, Carrier also will be forced to accept $7 million in tax cuts from the state of Indiana to help pay for a $16 million upgrade at the Indianapolis plant. And remember that big tariff on selling Mexican-produced air conditioners in the U.S.? Well, forget it. There won’t be any.
With such brutally punishing Trump consequences for moving jobs to Mexico, you can imagine corporate executives lining up to bend over like cadets paddled in a military school hazing, shouting: “Give me another one, please, SIR!!”
Walker’s WEDC Failure
From the Walker experience in Wisconsin, we know the truth about Republicans creating lots of jobs by passing out lots of millions dollars to their corporate campaign contributors. It doesn’t work.
Walker set up a special agency to shower millions of tax dollars on wealthy Wisconsin corporations in tax breaks and low-interest loans. The companies were thrilled to get it, but Wisconsin continued to trail the nation in job creation. The state didn’t even bother to track millions of dollars in loans.
A truly baffling question following the presidential election was how any working-class voter could be duped into believing a billionaire living in a gold-plated tower who would never allow their kind into his luxury hotels or onto his golf courses would ever have any concern about their lives or think of them at all.
While Trump’s hate mongering on race and religion attracted much of the media attention—and a lot of support from the white working class—his public attacks on Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, hedge fund managers and the wealthy were even more absurd.
Demonizing other races and religions simply reflected his low opinion of how best to attract support from those poorly educated, white voters he professed to love so much.
But Trump’s condemnation of aloof billionaire oligarchs such as himself who work the political system to keep the vulgar rabble who showed up at his rallies wallowing at the bottom of the economy was laughably dishonest.
That’s become obvious as Trump has begun assembling a cabinet of billionaires drawn directly from Goldman Sachs, Wall Street and shady industries such as Amway to reign over a New Gilded Age for himself, his immediate family and other exalted nobility.
Wildly made-up numbers of promised jobs are as meaningless as the other unconstitutional and illegal promises Trump made to stir up hate and get elected that he has now begun discarding.
Count on this one, though, from Wisconsin’s experience. There will be big tax cuts going overwhelmingly to the wealthy at the very top that barely trickle down onto working people at the bottom.
