Calling individual companies — and people out on Twitter — won’t work for Donald Trump long-term.
The president-elect of the United States of America, Donald Trump, says he’s gonna call every company that’s planning on offshoring its production, and thereby eliminating American factory jobs.
Or so he says. He said this to his incoming chief of staff, Reince Priebus, in front of a room full of reporters there interviewing him for Time magazine, which has named him as its Person of the Year:
"Hey, Reince, I want to get a list of companies that have announced they’re leaving. I can call them myself. Five minutes apiece. They won’t be leaving. O.K.?"
That could be a big list, and we should hold him to it as this might slip his mind; Trump claimed not to have remembered his promises to help the workers at the Indianapolis Carrier factory should he win election – until he caught someone talking about it on the nightly news. And even then he said his words were taken out of context.
You can read him however you like, but for me there’s a couple of takeaways from all of this.
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President-elect Trump clearly watches a lot of TV news. He actually fired off some angry tweets at the president of Carrier’s union local after he saw the guy on CNN, explaining how Trump has been playing it loose with the actual number of Carrier jobs saved.
I think that’s bad.
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Trump is clearly interested in keeping jobs in the United States.
That’s good!
Now he needs a plan. It will take a long, long, long long long time for him to personally call each company that is considering outsourcing its project. Instead, the president-elect should instead put in place policies that will encourage manufacturing to stay in the United States.
He needs a manufacturing policy, like the one outlined here.
Get tough on China’s trade practices. Make sure corporate tax reform helps manufacturing and doesn’t just reward Wall Street. Invest in worker training programs. Attach Buy America rules to federal infrastructure funding.
That’s how you help American manufacturing. It’ll be a lot more effective than a hundred five-minute phone calls.