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In my latest Pittsburgh Tribune-Review column, I reflect more on Trump’s Carrier deal [2]. (When I wrote this column several days ago the reported number of jobs saved was 1,000. Now that estimated number is down to 800. Also, I’ve since learned that the products that those 800 workers in America help to produce are furnaces.) A slice:
The saved jobs are concentrated in one place. Those workers are aware that, without Trump’s intervention, they would have had to find other jobs.
But the cost of saving these jobs is spread over more than 6.5 million Indianans whose taxes are effectively raised by this intervention, and by hundreds of millions of consumers who will pay higher air-conditioner [actually, furnace] prices. Not realizing their loss, they remain silent despite the total of these losses being greater than the total gains to United Technologies and its workers.
Also among the losers, of course, are the Mexican workers denied an opportunity to build better lives for themselves and their families. Trump’s crony-capitalist trade policy, therefore, is at odds with his desire to keep poor Mexicans from emigrating to the United States. Mexicans whose economic opportunities improve through trade with Americans are less likely to emigrate northward in search of higher-paying jobs.
Yet Trump would rather wall us Americans off from our neighbors to the south — making both America and Mexico poorer — than allow us all to be united by the peaceful and enriching bonds of commerce.