title:  Carrier Makes APPALLING Announcement Less Than A Week After Trump’s ‘Deal’
text: Donald Trump and all his cohorts are exalting him as a master of business following his deal with Carrier to keep roughly 1,000 jobs in Indiana (while still moving more than half to Mexico anyway). He did it by giving them a whopping $7 million tax break and other incentives, which told the rest of the corporate world that if they want more tax breaks, they should threaten to send jobs out of the country.So this might have saved some Americans  jobs, and in the short term, that s a good thing. HOWEVER. There s a catch. Carrier has announced that it will raise its prices in January. A death spiral can begin with that, and it appears that it s something Trump only fleetingly considered.Carrier insists that their decision to raise prices has nothing to do with their decision to keep some jobs here. Indeed, they did announce their price increase a week before Trump reached a deal with them. The problem is that, if their prices go up and competitors  prices don t, they ll find themselves at a disadvantage if they find they actually need the price increase to offset higher manufacturing costs. Then those saved jobs could disappear anyway.There are also global forces that have taken manufacturing jobs away from the U.S. that we can t stop no matter how many individual deals Trump manages to strike. Carrier, and others, may find themselves not just at a disadvantage with each other, but at a severe disadvantage with foreign competitors, even if Trump tries to slap a tariff on those imports (which won t work).As many people have noted, striking deals with companies one by one is not the way to improve our jobs market or our economy. And economists all over the political spectrum believe this is a seriously bad idea   they destroy an economy from the inside out. Even Sarah Palin recognizes this as crony capitalism, and Sarah Palin is about as dense and clueless as they come. The government is not a business and Trump needs to stop acting like it is.Besides all that, other companies that game Trump to get bigger tax breaks could still raise their prices, and still basically do what greedy corporations do to enrich themselves and fuck the rest of us sideways with rusty chainsaws. We need broad economic policy and overhaul, not individual deals with manufacturers and huge tariffs on companies that offshore jobs.Whether Carrier was already going to raise prices or not, this little announcement shows one of the many dark sides of Trump s approach to saving jobs. In the end, it s not likely to work.Featured image by Tasos Katopodis via Getty Images