Transcription
Welcome friends to another Wolf Response. I call this one Trump's doomed economic policy riddled with contradictions. I want to focus all of us for a while on Mr. Trump and his administration's claim that the most important policy, economic policy of his administration is to get corporations currently producing goods and services outside the United States and then often bringing them back here for sale to relocate those production facilities back into the United States to bring those jobs home, as he sometimes says, to really pressure corporations to move their facilities, their factories, their offices into the United States. He claims that that's what he's aiming for. He even claims that it's already happening. And I'm going to show you that the claim that it's happening is clearly not the case. And number two, that the policy is so riddled with contradictions that there's very little chance it will ever work. And why not? Turns out because of Mr. Trump. He is his own worst enemy. Let me explain.
The decision where to locate a business is made by the employer of that business, the owners of that business. That's usually a small group of people, the major shareholders, the board of directors, uh, an entity usually with 10 or 20 people on it. And they make the decision for the whole enterprise even if it has 50, 100, or 50 or 100,000 employees. Location decisions are made by capitalists, the people who own and operate the capitalist system we live in. So if Mr. Trump is going to succeed, it requires the businessmen and women who sit on the boards of directors of the major corporations, both American and foreign. It means they have to decide to move their facilities into the United States. And I'm now going to give you a short, incomplete list of things Mr. Trump is doing that will make them hesitate very long and very hard before they do any such thing as move their facilities into the United States. And again, this is a partial list. If I had more time, I could go on and on. Let's begin.
Mr. Trump has sent troops, American troops into Portland, Oregon, Memphis, Tennessee, Chicago. He is threatening New York City, the largest city. Here's something no CEO wants to go near. A society so caught up in tension and conflict that it is sending its own troops into its own cities to confront its own people. That's the kind of condition that CEOs run away from because it's costly, because it's dangerous, because you have to have all kinds of expenses to protect yourself from the results of that kind of a social situation.
Number two, the United States government is photographed every day when its ICE army arrests, often brutally, undocumented immigrants or people it believes rightly or wrongly to be undocumented immigrants. It turns out that a well-known uh superintendent of schools in one of our states with a spotless performance record is yanked out of his job. No one knew, and we still don't know if it's valid. All kinds of immigrants who have lived here for many years, established themselves in many jobs, working hard, moving up the ladder, paying taxes, spending their income on local stores to keep their communities going. They're being snatched out of their jobs and communities, turning what were thriving neighborhoods into danger zones. Our incoming corporates might discover that the people they're hiring will be yanked out of the job, that they will lose precious time, precious training, you know, like that lithium battery factory in Georgia whose entire workforce was arrested, stopped from working by ICE. Is that what you face if you make the mistake to come here? But I'm just getting started.
Many businesses have complicated relationships with not-for-profit enterprises, all kinds of teaching institutes, charitable efforts, educational. Now, the government has announced, Mr. Trump's government, that they're going after tax-exempt organizations, going to take away their IRS tax exemption, going to take away their ability to function if they in any way support the political ideas the Trump administration doesn't want. We don't know which 501c3 enterprises will be targeted. The language is very vague, very ominous, but very vague. Anybody moving to the United States is going to have to deal with the unknown attacks on all kinds of allies and associations they might need to make as part of their business. United States government hasn't behaved like this before, and it's certainly not something that attracts a businessman or woman to move here.
Then the government has made massive cuts in Medicaid and also massive cuts in all kinds of government services. Here's what the medical professionals tell us. If you don't take care of the Medicaid people, if you don't provide the costs and cover them, then they won't go to the doctor when they otherwise might. They won't go to the emergency room or the hospital when they need to, but they can't afford it. And so, their illnesses will go untreated. And you know what happens then? The illness spreads. This is not smart. What is being done? It genuinely qualifies for stupid. We're making our people sicker. Why would a corporation want to move to a place where the medical care is deteriorating in terms of how many people it covers and how well it covers them? But that's what this government is doing. And like everything else I've listed to you, these are factors that dissuade potential corporate visitors from ever coming here. They listen to Mr. Trump say you should. But when they look at what Mr. Trump actually does, the conclusion they draw, we shouldn't, unless we don't care about profits and then we can kiss our careers goodbye.
But let me return to the list. The Department of Education is being dismantled. The money that used to be dispersed at various levels in this society, higher education, high school, elementary school, is being cut back. You know what that does to the quality of education? It doesn't enhance it. It diminishes it. All kinds of programs have already been cut. All kinds of departments in universities are shutting down or cutting back. What it means to go to school is being diminished. And let me tell you something, any corporate executive you can find will confirm. One of the most important bases for deciding where to locate is the quality of the labor force where you're going. Why leave, for example, China, where they open a new university almost every month, and move to the United States where they close one every month? That makes no sense at all. And they're not going to do it.
It's not as though a diminished quality of education for millions of people weren't enough. But we can show from many statistics that the American people, especially now that unemployment is rising, that good jobs are hard to find. Young people are reacting to their difficult economic circumstances by choosing not to go to college. Enrollments are way down, applications are way down. There's no secret about it. You are reducing the quality of your educated labor force, and that is not going to make companies come here. Quite the opposite.
The rest of the world is doing a lot about fossil fuels in their automobiles and their trucks and their home heating. They're switching away from burning oil and gas to other less polluting energy sources. Why? Because pollution makes people sick. Lung cancer, asthma, emphysema. I could go on. The United States under Trump is busily not making the transition. Mr. Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris Accords that were supposed to do that on a global scale. The Chinese are announcing more and more advances, remarkable ones, in switching to clean energy. We're doing the opposite. Why would a corporation come here and leave there if the rest of the world is doing what we all know the United States should be doing, too? But we're protecting the oil and gas companies because they give Mr. Trump a lot of money. Wow. Think about it.
Everyone knows that the level of conversation and the level of nasty bitterness dividing the United States regionally, ethnically, and in every other way are at levels we had not only not seen before, but had expected we never would see. It's a country racked with divisions. The president refers to people who are anti-capitalist as anti-American or even anti-Christian. You know, this is extraordinary language. And we see it in everything he does. This is a badly, bitterly, and deeply divided society. That's not an invitation any CEO will respond to. Quite the contrary.
Let me talk about inflation. It's a problem for businesses if their costs are going to be going up as opposed to down. Especially businesses who come to the United States and hope to sell in the world. I won't uh embarrass anyone by asking you, are you aware of the rate of inflation in China? Well, if you're not, let me tell you what it is right now. Minus 0.4%. That's right. Chinese inflation is negative. It's deflation. In the United States, it's about 3% and likely to go higher. Not an attractive quality if you're choosing between China, the second biggest industrial uh power, if not the first already, and the United States.
Even the tariffs, if you think about it for five minutes, you'll understand that they are a riddled in contradiction nonsense. Also, more than ever in American history, producing anything in the United States requires you to bring in parts of it from other parts of the world. That car you you say is made in Detroit. Well, yes, but also no, because huge parts of it, the carburetor, the engine, you name it, are imported. So is the rubber in the tire. So is some of the steel, and on and on and on. And when the government puts tariffs on all of these inputs, it means if you come here and you pay to use those things to build whatever you build here, you will be charged those tariffs. You wouldn't be if they weren't there. But Mr. Trump has put them there. Nobody else. And so you don't move because it isn't profitable enough.
So Mr. Trump stands exposed. He wants us to believe everything he's doing is bringing jobs here. He doesn't want us to understand that it's more accurate to say that most of the things Mr. Trump does contradict what he says his goal and purpose are. Trump's economic policy is doomed because the contradictions in it leave no other outcome available to him. And you should think about that when you listen to the lovely language and ask yourself, what is the reality behind it?
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