By Daniel John Sobieski, December 4, 2016

No sooner had president-elect Trump announced a deal had been reached with air conditioner manufacturer Carrier to keep 1,100 manufacturing jobs in Indiana rather than being shipped to Mexico, the usual suspects began chattering about “corporate welfare”, “crony capitalism”, and the hypocritical picking of winners and losers.

Carrier is an established business, not a pipe dream like the green energy failures President Obama subsidized like Solyndra. It is one of many U.S. businesses struggling to survive in the Obama era of high taxes and oppressive regulation. Trump has promised to cut corporate taxes and eliminate oppressive and job-killing regulations, but he is not president just yet. The Carrier package of tax incentives he helped negotiate is but a down payment on this promise. All companies will soon be freed from the shackles of job-killing taxes and regulations. They will not have to game the system by threatening to go to Mexico. Trump’s tax and regulation cuts will create the fertile business environment that will allow them to stay and grow profitably.

The deal puts money in the hands of a U.S. business which will use it to grow, and in the hands of 1,100 employees who will give their families a Merry Christmas. They will get paychecks instead of unemployment checks and food stamps. The $7 million over a decade is dwarfed by the economic and human costs of not making the deal.

States and cities offer tax breaks and incentives all the time to lure businesses all the time from other states. In Illinois in 2011 Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn gave such breaks to keep Sears and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in Obama’s home state. Letting profitable businesses keep more of the money they earned rather than turn it over to the feds to be wasted in money pits like Solyndra or to subsidize green energy companies tilting at windmills is not corporate welfare but merely good common and business sense. Trump isn’t picking winners and losers. He is trying to help a winner continue to thrive and grow.

As far as Carrier goes, the score is Trump 1100, Obama zero. In June, Obama mocked Trump’s desire to keep employers like Carrier from leaving the country. Obama called them the “jobs of the past” and in effect said good riddance to them:

In June, President Obama participated in a PBS townhall and was asked about Trump's promise to keep Carrier's Indiana plant in the U.S. The townhall participant -- Eric Cottonham, a member of the Steelworkers Union employed by Carrier -- asked Obama if anything could be done to stem the tide of jobs flowing out of the country, as Trump had recently promised to do.

"I see here you’re doing a lot of things, but in Indianapolis, there’s nothing there for us," he asked. "I mean, what’s next? I mean, what can we look forward to in the future as far as jobs, employment, whatever? Because all of our jobs has left or in the process of leaving, sir.”

"Those jobs of the past are just not going to come back," Obama told Cottonham.

Instead, Obama advised workers losing their jobs to learn how to adapt their skills to "some of these new technologies," in particular, the "clean energy sector."

"Let's focus on those," he suggested. "The days when you just being able to -- you just being willing to work hard and you can now walk into a plant and suddenly there’s going to be a job for you for 30 years or 40 years, that’s just not going to be there for our kids because more and more, that stuff’s going to be automated."

snip

Crony capitalism is blowing $500 million of the taxpayer dollars on an industry that can’t survive without federal subsidies. Carrier is not Solyndra. Trump picked a winner. Obama was the one who picked losers.


http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/...l#ixzz4RtQ7qEch