Much hoopla was made out of Carrier's recent commitment to reinvest in their local operations in Indiana as result of their "deal" with Governor Mike Pence, but that reinvestment will soon mean the jobs that were supposedly saved will disappear.
They aren't investing in new production lines or future jobs, they're investing in automation and robots.
“We’re going to… automate to drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive,” [United Technologies CEO Greg Hayes] said. “Is it as cheap as moving to Mexico with lower cost labor? No. But we will make that plant competitive just because we’ll make the capital investments there. But what that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”
This speaks to not just the sham of dolling out tax breaks to temporarily keep a handful of jobs in any given state, it's a preview of what's going to happen over the coming years and decades regardless of what the Trump regime does.
Every voter, whether liberal or conservative, should be deeply skeptical of any politician who promises to bring back jobs that either don't exist anymore or won't exist in the near future.
The same could be said for politicians who reflexively oppose any and all international trade deals that will supposedly kill jobs that were actually automated out of existence.
We're going to have to deal with the consequences of our automated future, but neither protectionism or crony capitalism will save us.