President-Elect Donald Trump's deal with Carrier to keep "close to a 1,000 jobs" in Indiana is great politics, but raises false hopes.
It's great politics because the public perception will be that Trump kept his promise to keep jobs from leaving America and that he is a man of his word who gets results.
But it raises false hopes that Trump can rescue all American manufacturing jobs or that he can singlehandedly stop free markets and international trade.
The people at Carrier will be forever grateful to Trump, but if Trump can't save other plants from closing working people are going to feel let down yet again.
Even if Trump does intervene in other cases there is also the question of creating manufacturing jobs. Trump cannot create these out of whole cloth. His administration can try to create the conditions to attract manufacturing jobs, but those conditions could often at a heavy cost to the taxpayer. It's all well and good to give tax incentives to businesses, but someone has to pay that bill and invariably it is us.
Of course it remains to be seen what this Carrier deal will be like in practice. Close to 1,000 jobs could be 500 jobs or maybe 100 jobs. Those 100 or 500 jobs could also be at considerably lower wages. There is no guarantee that Carrier can sustain this deal. If Carrier doesn't meet its profit margins those jobs could easily disappear yet again. Naturally Trump would blame Carrier for not holding up its end of the deal and Trump will again be hailed a champion of the American working class. But it takes two to make a deal and Trump entered into it knowing full well it might not be worth the paper on which it is written.
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