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Dec. 8, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
15:49
Ep. 220 - Trump Saved Jobs! But How?
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Barack Obama spent an outsized portion of his presidency lecturing Americans about illegal immigration.
He unilaterally suspended prosecutions of a wide swath of illegal immigrants through his executive amnesty, meanwhile railing all about the evils of the Republicans.
He ripped Donald Trump's supposed xenophobia Over Trump's strict anti-illegal immigration proposals.
But Obama and Democrats don't actually care about illegal immigrants.
In fact, they would actually prefer that illegal immigrants retain that status so they can be used as a political sword against Republicans.
The fact is on full display this morning.
After a senior policy advisor to Obama said Obama would not confer a blanket pardon on illegal immigrants, Cecilia Munoz, who's a domestic policy advisor, she said, quote, I know that people are hoping for use of a pardon authority as a way to protect people.
It's ultimately not for a couple of reasons.
One is that general pardon authority is generally designed for criminal violations, not civil.
But it also doesn't confer legal status, only Congress can do that, and so ultimately it wouldn't protect a single soul from deportation, so it's not an answer here for this population.
That, by the way, was also true of Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans program, that's DACA and DAPA.
They didn't grant citizenship or prevent future deportations.
They merely stopped deportations here and now.
Pardoning illegal immigrants would remove the legal pretext for deportation.
Other crimes, such as fraud, if you're using a social security number that's false, that would still be prosecutable, but it might not be punishable with deportation.
In fact, Obama could pardon those crimes as well, removing all legal grounds for prosecution.
This isn't making the case Obama should pardon illegal immigrants, of course.
It would be the essence of lawlessness, a gross abuse of the executive power.
But Obama hasn't typically cared about any of that in the past, including on illegal immigration.
And that's the point.
Obama doesn't want to protect illegal immigrants in any real way without giving them full voting rights.
He wants them to be stuck in limbo so Democrats can claim they're victimized by evil Republicans.
That's why Democrats did not push comprehensive immigration reform when they controlled both houses of Congress from 2008 to 2010.
Stop with the routine in which Democrats are deeply concerned about illegal immigrants as anything but political tools.
They simply aren't.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Tons to get to today here on the Ben Shapiro Show, and we'll get to it all.
We have the mailbag coming up a little bit later.
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Lots of things to hate lately, which just makes me happy, I know.
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So we begin today with a continuation of a theme a little bit from yesterday.
And that, of course, is this situation with carriers.
So, one of the things that I've been preaching, and I'm going to continue to preach here, is that we need to call out Trump when he's wrong, and we need to compliment him when he's right.
I know that my good friend Andrew Klavan doesn't feel the same way.
Klavan and I had this conversation off-air just before the program.
I was talking about this carrier deal, which I'll explain in just a minute and why I think it's a problem.
And he was saying, yeah, but overall Trump is doing a good job.
I said, I may very well agree that overall Trump is doing a pretty good job, but that doesn't require me to ignore when he does things that are bad.
See, that argument that Trump overall is good, that's an election argument.
That's an argument that he's going to be better than Hillary, for example.
But Hillary's no longer in the picture.
Now your obligation as a citizen is to make sure the president does as many things as you can get him to do that you want him to do.
Your obligation is to hold him accountable when he does things that are wrong.
That's my obligation as a citizen too.
It's not my obligation to sort of sign off and just say, oh, well, now he's been elected.
He's popular.
That means that he can do whatever he wants.
And so long as he gives me more good than bad, I'm just going to shut up and sit here.
That's not my job.
It's actually a non sequitur.
If you have a friend and your friend embezzles from you and your wife comes to you and she says, your friend just embezzled.
And you say, yeah, but overall he's a good friend.
That's a non sequitur.
That doesn't deal with the main issue, which is that he just embezzled from you.
You might want to address the embezzlement if you don't want future embezzlement.
I would prefer to stop Donald Trump from ruining his presidency with bad policy than I would to just compliment him when he thinks that he does things that are bad.
I think the carrier deal is bad, and let me explain why I think the carrier deal is bad.
The best way for me to explain why I think the Carrier deal is bad is, number one, let me explain to you, let me state the problem.
The problem is not just that the Carrier deal is bad.
For people who missed it, Carrier is an air conditioning and heating manufacturer located in Indiana.
They were going to shift 1,000 jobs to Mexico, and now they're not.
And they say they're not going to, basically because the state of Indiana offered them some tax incentives, and also because Donald Trump threatened them.
That's basically what it comes down to.
According to the New York Times, or others from Politico, John Moots, a former Indiana lieutenant governor who sits on an agency board in Indiana, he told Politico Carrier turned down a previous offer from that board before the election that offered all these tax incentives for Carrier to stay in Indiana.
He said he thinks the choice is driven by concerns from Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, That it could lose a portion of its roughly $6.7 billion in federal contracts.
So in other words, what happened here is that it cost Carrier something like $65 million to keep these jobs in Indiana.
And so the question was, why would $4 or $5 million of tax incentives from Indiana keep those jobs there?
And the answer is, they wouldn't, right?
Pence offered this to Carrier before.
That's crony capitalism in and of itself.
But he offered it to them before, Carrier turned it down, now Trump selected, and suddenly they reversed themselves.
They didn't reverse themselves because of Trump's regulatory and tax policy.
That would be a good thing, right?
That would be great.
If Carrier said, listen, now the business climate is awesome, we're staying right here.
That would be great.
That would be good, Trump.
But it's bad, Trump, if Trump goes to them and says, I'm threatening you.
If you leave, then I am going to take all of this taxpayer money, and I'm not going to spend it with you.
I'm going to spend even more taxpayer money with your competitor.
Because here's the thing, right?
Every defense department technology contract, every defense department contract by law, has to go through a bidding process.
And that bidding process requires you to show that you can provide the best product for the cheapest.
So that means that presumably, if the law was obeyed, then the defense department contracts with United Technologies were the best contracts that were available.
That's the whole goal of having a bidding process.
Now Trump is saying, I know that was the best deal available, and it's still the best deal available.
But screw that, I'm going to spend twice as much money on some other company just to punish United Technologies because I want my headline from them and I want my headline right now.
I want the headline that says that I saved a thousand jobs so I can go around the country bragging about how I saved a thousand jobs.
This is called economic fascism.
It is, and that's not...
Linked in any way to fascism with regard to race or fascism with regard to religion.
Economic fascism is an actual economic philosophy, it's called corporatism, that believes that the federal government should pick winners and losers.
And it originated in Italy with Mussolini.
This notion that the government should pick winners and losers, that basically corporation and corporatism, they share the same root.
And that root is corp.
Right?
Corps.
Corps, right?
They're talking about a body, right?
The idea is that the entire economy is like a body, and the federal government, any government, should decide which parts of the economy should be which parts of the body.
So, you don't want, you don't want three hands, you want two hands.
And that means that the government is going to decide which two companies should be those two hands.
This is very dangerous stuff.
It's top-down government-run economics, and that always results in less useful economic development.
It results in worse business deals.
It results in spending more taxpayer money.
It results in more regulation.
None of this is good stuff.
And just because Donald Trump got a good headline out of it doesn't make it a good thing.
And just because you think that he got a good headline out of it because we want to keep jobs in America, and so he was doing the right thing to keep jobs in America, now we're going to flashback.
Now we're going to flashback.
Okay?
Here's the flashback.
The flashback is to 2009.
Here's Barack Obama in 2009.
This is February 2009, right after he's elected.
And you're going to see Barack Obama do the exact same routine at Caterpillar.
This is in Peoria, Illinois.
Looks a lot younger, obviously.
This is in 2009, February 2009, and conservatives ripped him a new one over this, as well they should have.
Yesterday, Jim, the head of Caterpillar, said that if Congress passes our plan, This company will be able to rehire some of the folks who were just laid off.
And that's a story I'm confident will be repeated at companies across the country.
Companies that are currently struggling to borrow money, selling their products, struggling to make payroll, but could find themselves in a different position when we start implementing the plan.
Rather than downsizing, they may be able to start growing again.
Rather than cutting jobs, they may be able to create them again.
That's the goal at the heart of this plan, to create jobs.
And not just any jobs, not just make work jobs, but putting people to work, doing the work that America needs done.
Repairing our infrastructure, modernizing our schools and our hospitals, promoting the- So that's Barack Obama, circa February 2009, talking about how Caterpillar had pledged that they were going to keep the jobs there.
Now the CEO of Caterpillar came out very shortly after, he said, well no, we never promised that we were going to do anything like that.
But the headline was already out.
Obama had already claimed that Caterpillar was going to save all these jobs because of his stimulus package, right?
And conservatives rightly went nuts.
In 2013, in Obama's State of the Union address, he name-checked Caterpillar and he said, look at all the jobs that I personally have saved by using the federal government as this cram-down mechanism by threatening people and cajoling people and giving them special stimulus packages.
Look at all the jobs that I've saved, including in places like Caterpillar.
Our first priority is making America a magnet for new jobs in manufacturing.
After shedding jobs for more than 10 years, our manufacturers have added about 500,000 jobs over the past three.
Caterpillar is bringing jobs back from Japan.
Ford is bringing jobs back from Mexico.
And this year, Apple will start making Macs in America again.
There are things we can do.
But then he would go on to suggest that we use the Department of Defense, you may notice similarity, use the Department of Defense to create programs to fund all of these places to continue to keep jobs in America.
And it was bad when this happened.
Because, number one, he wasn't telling the truth.
You don't create jobs in America by redistributing income from taxpayers to companies.
You don't create jobs in America by giving special tax incentives to companies that would be more productive elsewhere.
That's not how you create jobs.
The way that you create jobs in America is by removing taxes and removing regulations, and not removing taxes for one company, removing taxes for all companies.
Otherwise, you are just granting special favors to one company at the expense of a competitor.
Carrier is not the only air conditioner and heating manufacturer in the United States.
And when you grant them special tax incentives, sure you might save the thousand jobs there, but how about all the people who have to pay the extra money for the stimulus?
How about all the people who are competing with Carrier, who are gaining jobs because they're doing a better job than Carrier, and building up their own jobs base, and now they're screwed because they have to cut workers because they can't compete with Carrier, which is getting a thumb on the scale from the federal government.
Nobody wants to look at the unintended consequences of government interventionism because it's too easy to see that specific headline, carrier saves thousand jobs in Indiana.
But how, is the question.
Not what happened, how did it happen?
The essence of fascism lies in somebody saying, I did it, it happened.
It's happened.
The fight against fascism relies on you saying, okay, I need to know how and whether that was good.
Fascism relies on people saying, the sausage has been created, here is the sausage.
The essence of republicanism, small-r republicanism, the essence of democracy, is you saying, how did the sausage get made and was that legitimate?
That is you being a good citizen.
And so it's not being a bad citizen to ask how this happened and whether it's a good thing.
It's not being anti-American to make sure that the methods that were used to do this were good and not bad.
And by the way, you have to extend the logic out.
Paul Krugman, who is an idiot on economics, except for some trade theory, Paul Krugman When he looked at this this morning, he says, well, Barack Obama created, you know, more jobs than this.
You'd have to do what Trump did.
You'd have to do that every day for every week for the next 30 years in order to save the number of jobs that Obama saved in the auto bailout.
And to a certain extent, he's right.
If you believe that stimulus, if you believe that special incentives, if you believe special giveaways save jobs, then why not just blow it up?
And that's actually Trump's plan.
He talks about $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which is just another boondoggle.
These infrastructure plans are boondoggles.
This is populism.
It's not conservatism.
It's not conservatism.
It has nothing to do with conservatism.
And in a little while, I want to talk about a Stephen Moore piece that is really egregious here, but I just want to show you how far we've come.
Here is Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter, circa 2009, ripping on President Obama, saying he's going to keep American jobs in America by granting stimulus.
Discovered what was actually in this bill.
They were rejecting it in droves.
So what I don't understand, with all the bad nominees and the tax cheats and closing down Gitmo and weakening our defenses, Barack Obama in a little over two weeks was, as Victor Davis Hanson said, on the verge of an implosion.
Why would the Republicans help him bail him out here?
And that's why he went on TV and started claiming we were going to go in the Great Depression if we didn't pass this massive socialist bill.
I am, once again, awed by the wisdom of the American people.
A week ago, this bill had like 80% support.
As of today, it's 37% support.
And I don't think anybody's read the whole bill.
It's twice the size of War and Peace.
But people just find out more and more what is in this bill.
and support for it is collapsing.
So Obama got there.
So you got in saying rightly about the stimulus bill.
The more we find out about it, the more we don't like it.
And now today we have people saying we don't need to know what Trump did.
What does it matter what was in this deal?
Why does it matter?
Does it really matter at all?
There's it.
And that's that's sort of what Stephen Moore says today.
Stephen Moore has this amazing piece at National Review.
Stephen Moore is an economist for The Wall Street Journal, very free market guy, supposedly.
And and he had a piece today at National Review in which he said that the era of Reagan is over.
And it's worth going through here a little bit.
But in order for you to see me go through it.
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