Señor Trumpanzee-- Working Class Hero?

Trump makes a big deal about keeping his campaign promises. And, unfortunately, the ones he wants to keep, he does try to keep. Sometimes the courts and occasionally, even Congress, keeps him from keeping the worst of them. His excuse for torpedoing the bipartisan DACA fix was that it flew in the face of one of his ugly outbursts of bigotry during the campaign. Now Ryan and McConnell are using his bizarre and incoherent approach as an excuse for not bringing popular DACA fixes to the floor of each house for a vote.

But on promise that was very specific, consistent, loud and very public during the campaign was his promise to the workers at the Carrier plant in Indianapolis. Looks like that's one he didn't really care much about-- or at least not enough about to do anything proactive once he had lost Marion County (Indianapolis) in 2016. Primary day was interesting there:

• Hillary- 59,649
• Bernie- 58,799
• Trumpanzee- 49,835
• Lyin' Ted- 39,557
• Kasich- 9,633

And, despite Mike Pence's presence on the ticket-- or maybe because of it-- Hillary kicked his ass in the county. She beat him 212,676 (58.9%) to 130,228 (36.1%). Maybe he thought he shaped have won the state's biggest county. He did do better than Romney had though. And he certainly won the state-- and the Carrier workers-- who are unionized-- helped. I bet they're sorry now.

It was raining in Indiana's capital city on the day Renee Elliott and millions of other blue collar Americans stunned the world by helping to elect a Manhattan real estate mogul the 45th president of the United States.

But all Elliott saw that day was sunshine.

As she waited patiently in line to cast her vote, Elliott said she was buoyed by the belief that Donald Trump would make good on his campaign pledge and prevent her job at the Carrier plant-- the job that she said allowed her to escape an abusive marriage and live a modest but comfortable life-- from being sent to Mexico.

Now, very soon, Elliott will be standing in another line-- the unemployment line.

Elliott, 44, was one of the 215 workers at the Indianapolis plant who were given pink slips on Thursday. And to say she is disappointed by Trump would be an understatement.

“We all voted for him,” she said of herself and her Carrier co-workers. “We just thought he was going to protect our jobs. It sounded really good. And then, boom.”

Elliott doesn't know what she is going to do next. She has only a high school diploma to go along with the hairdresser license she earned before she got the job five years ago at Carrier, when she was studying to be a nurse.

“My five-year plan was to finish out nursing school and work on the line and take classes at night,” she said.

What Elliott does know is that it will be hard to find anything that will match the $18-an-hour she made as a press operator at Carrier-- and that whatever savings she had were eaten up raising two now-grown kids. Her 73-year-old mother, who had also been living with her, has moved in with her brother, who still has a job at Carrier.

“Being a paycheck away from being homeless is terrifying,” she said.

...Elliott’s fate was sealed long before she voted for Trump. The Carrier Company announced on Feb. 10, 2016, that it was closing its plants in Indianapolis and Huntington, Indiana, and moving the operations to Monterrey, Mexico.

It was during the first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton that Trump gave Elliott and her co-workers some hope that their lives and livelihood would be spared.

“We have to stop our companies from leaving the United States and, with it, firing all of their people,” Trump declared. “All you have to do is take a look at Carrier air-conditioning in Indianapolis. They left-- fired 1,400 people. They’re going to Mexico.”

The exact details of what was happening at Carrier were somewhat different. But the gist of what Trump said on national television electrified the workers on the Carrier plant floor.

Suddenly, there was a savior on the horizon.

Until that moment, Elliott said she didn’t think much of Trump, the son of a wealthy real estate developer who was trying to cast himself as a working-class hero.



“When I first heard on the radio that he was going to run, you’re thinking, ‘He’s a billionaire and so forth,’” she said. “And I was thinking, ‘There’s no way, but he’s going to find a cause and pick it up and when he does he’ll change things. And little did I know we’ll be the cause.”

Elliott said workers began showing up for their shifts in red Make America Great Again baseball caps and she started seeing Trump bumper stickers and posters everywhere.

After the election, there seemed to be even more reason to cheer when a triumphant Trump and his running mate Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, announced that they had worked out a deal with Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, to save “more than a thousand jobs right here in the head of the Heartland.”

“Actually the number’s over 1,100 people, which is so great, which is so great,” Trump said.

Chuck Jones, the tough-talking Local 1999 steel worker president who spent decades fighting the exodus of good-paying American manufacturing jobs to countries like Mexico, said he didn’t buy what Trump was selling. Jones began working in the 1970s when 19.4 million Americans had manufacturing jobs, a number that had shrunk to fewer than 11.5 million when he recently retired.

“I didn’t vote for Trump,” he said. “And I kept on saying I think he’s full of shit.”

Privately, however, Jones hoped Trump would prove him wrong. He worked for the nearby Rexnord plant for more than 40 years before that operation was moved to Monterrey. And he knows a lot of the Carrier workers who had pinned their hopes on Trump. But as Trump spoke, Jones did the math.

“When Trump and Pence showed up here, they kept on referring to the fact they had saved over 1,100 jobs,” he said. “The people in the crowd thought that everybody was going to have a job. They misled the people.”

Jones said it was an especially cruel move because many of the Carrier workers had already made peace with the idea that layoffs were looming and were looking for other jobs.

“Then people went home that evening and told their families, ‘Everything is going to be all right. President Trump saved our jobs,’” Jones said.

The Carrier plant in Indianapolis will have a work force of 1,100 people after about 215 workers depart Thursday, “completing the final phase of the previously announced plan to relocate fan coil manufacturing production lines,” Ashley Barrie, a spokeswoman for United Technologies, said in an email to NBC News.

Also, Barrie added, the laid-off workers will “receive a one-time payment, severance pay and six months of medical insurance.”

“Since the initial announcement, approximately 60 impacted employees have chosen to take advantage of the company’s Employee Scholar Program and pursue degree programs,” Barrie said. “In addition to reimbursing four-year education costs, Carrier has also reimbursed, and will continue to reimburse, technical training costs for those who prefer to pursue a vocational technical certification program.”

Elliott said she was convinced her job was safe until some strangers from Monterrey showed up at the plant.

“Mexicans came in and some even came to me and asked questions, but I didn’t want to talk to them,” she said.

But other Carrier workers were forced to train those who would be doing their jobs for a quarter of the salary the Americans made.

“The Mexicans aren’t our enemy,” Jones said. “Pure and simple, corporate greed is driving it.”

...Come Friday, though, Elliott will be another unemployed American factory worker. “At my age, I don’t have the confidence to start all over again,” she said.

Virginia Foxx's opponent in North Carolina's 5th district, Jenny Marshall grew up in a small town in Indiana. She told us that she "saw first hand the damage NAFTA had on our town and in the communities across our country. The effects were swift and brutal. Companies packed up and left town seeking out cheap labor in foreign countries. My father was a tool and die maker in a plant that employed hundreds of people in a town of just 17,000. When they closed and shipped their jobs out of the country it caused a ripple effect of businesses closing across the town. It was devastating. We must end these disastrous free trade policies that allow companies to shutter plants just to import those products back into the United States to be sold to the people who used to make them. And we cannot expect people to pick up the pieces and find a new career time and time again. It is a simple case of companies prioritizing profits over the people who work for them. I say enough is enough. It is high time our laws actually protect the people instead of a company's bottom line."

    

No, Folks Being Destroyed By Trump's Broken Promises In Red States Do NOT Deserve What They're Getting Now

West Virginia was one of Señor Trumpanzee’s best-performing states. He buried Clinton-- 489,371(68.5%) to a pathetic 188,794 (26.4%). She didn’t campaign there and she didn’t have a message for West Virginia’s working families that might lead them to believe life might improve for them if they voted for her. Today you hear some people-- who identify themselves as “progressives”-- saying that West Virginia’s poor deserve Medicaid cuts because the state voted so overwhelmingly for Trump. Take that you awful resident of a state that backed Trump. It’s pretty disgusting, like all forms of collective punishment.

The biggest county in the state is Kanawha, home of the state’s biggest city, Charleston, where Bernie’s Save Our Health Care rally drew a couple of thousand enthusiastic West Virginians Sunday night. Trump beat Hillary badly in Kanawha-- 43,464 (58.0%) to 27,985 (37.3%). She was the wrong candidate. And folks there told Democrats that in the primary. Bernie won in the primary. In fact, he took every single county in the state-- 123,860 (51.4%) to 86,354 (35.8%). Trump got more votes than Bernie did in Kanawha, but not many more. Trump got 13,936 votes and Bernie got 13,480 votes. Close-- a lot closer than Trump/Clinton.

Other counties in West Virginia showed that people were hungry for a populist message of hope and more people turned out for Bernie than for Trump. Some were very close, like Brooke County, where Bernie got 1,966 votes and Señor Trumpanzee did nearly as well with 1,963 votes. And, no, that’s not because the Republican field was so strong; quite the contrary. Ted Cruz was the runner up in Boone and he only got 176 votes. Hillary came in second and she got 1,489 votes. Across the state, the Republicans were much more unified behind Trump, while Democrats preferred Bernie but with virtually all counties giving Hillary far better numbers than the other Republicans competing. In Brooke, for example, this was the score:

And I just grabbed Brooke County randomly because it’s a couple of miles from Pennsylvania to the east and Ohio to the west. Let’s look at some other West Virginia counties that looked at the candidates and went to the primary and picked Bernie over both Hillary and Trump.

• Boone: Bernie- 2,410; Trumpanzee- 1,388
• Braxton: Bernie- 1,321;Trumpanzee- 861
• Calhoun: Bernie- 803; Trumpanzee- 480
• Clay: Bernie- 754; Trumpanzee- 568
• Fayette: Bernie- 3,585; Trumpanzee- 2,683
• Gilmer: Bernie- 643; Trumpanzee- 433
• Lincoln: Bernie- 1,510; Trumpanzee- 1,193
• Logan: Bernie- 3,201; Trumpanzee- 1,665
• Marion: Bernie- 5,324; Trumpanzee- 4,035
• McDowell: Bernie- 1,473; Trumpanzee- 760
• Mingo: Bernie-2,425; Trumpanzee- 1,161
• Monongalia: Bernie- 8,096; Trumpanzee- 5,971
• Randolph: Bernie- 2,492; Trumpanzee- 2,206
• Wayne: Bernie- 2,898; Trumpanzee- 2,662
• Webster: Bernie- 837; Trumpanzee- 423
• Wetzel: Bernie- 1744; Trumpanzee- 1.096

And, no, these are not all college towns. This is a cross section of West Virginia counties, where people were eager to hear a message that would left their families’ lives. They heard it most convincingly not from Clinton and not even from Trump, but from Bernie. Monongalia, for example, whose county seat in Morgantown, is the third biggest county in the state. Bernie killed Trump there. Mingo is smack up against Kentucky in the southwest corner of the state-- "the bloodiest county in America,” where Obama only got 8% of the primary vote in 2008. The is coal county, as are Logan and McDowell, both right next door. And all 3 gave far more votes to Bernie that day than to Señor Trumpanzee. They wanted change… but most of them wanted good change, not bad change.

No, these people don’t “deserve” the misery Trumpcare is going to bury them in. This is ground zero in the opioid epidemic. These desperate folks need help-- the kind of help Bernie promised, not the thin tissue of lies Trump spouted off to them only to be served the nightmare of Trumnpcare now.

And, by the way… even though Bernie crush Hillary in the primary, Wassermann Schultz had the rules all fixed up nice so that he only won one more delegate than she did. With friends like that behind the curtain, who needs a message? And who needs to bother campaigning? No wonder so many Bernie primary voters, pulled their levers for Trump rather than Hillary in the general election! They recognized Wassermann Schultz was fucking the country-- and after she got fired from the DNC, Hillary gave her a job in her campaign. The crooked monstrosity is still in Congress too-- help Tim Canova beat her in the Democratic primary here.

Ready for some tears?



A lot of desperate Trump voters-- who couldn’t connect to Clinton and didn’t trust something about her for some reason-- may be starting to feel a little buyers’ remorse. Not the dyed-in-the-wool racist scum… that part of his base would rather die from lack of healthcare than see a black president’s policies make life better for their own families, but enough of them to make a difference if the Democrats don’t run another establishment corporate shill next time. Look at those poor Carrier workers in Indiana, for example. Do you think some of them got suckered by the breezy Trumpanzee lies tisane their jobs? They’re learning what Trump’s word means now. CBS News just reported that Trump’s lies are coming back to bite his voters in the ass as 600 of their jobs head south to Monterey, Mexico, along with millions of dollars then-Governor Pence paid Carrier to keep the plant open. 600… that’s a lot of families who just figured out that working people can’t count on Trump or Pence or the GOP.

A promise made before Christmas is fizzling before the Fourth of July.

In December, then-President-elect Trump told hundreds of workers at the Carrier manufacturing plant that he had worked out a deal to save their jobs.

But it's not working out that way. A steady downpour today did little to wash away the fact that the jobs of 600 union employees are going south.

"They're going to Monterrey, Mexico," said Robert James, president of the local union.

Reynolds said he felt betrayed, since Mr. Trump told workers during his December visit to the plant that 1,100 jobs would be saved.

"And by the way, that number is going to go up very substantially as they expand this area, this plant," Mr. Trump said. "So the 1,100 is going to be a minimum number."

Blasting companies for moving American jobs abroad was a feature of the Trump campaign, and saving the Carrier jobs was touted as a sign of Mr. Trump's bargaining prowess.

"You're going to have a good Christmas," he said at the plant.

But the truth is that 400 of the 1,100 jobs Mr. Trump mentioned were white-collar positions that were never going away.

Only 700 union jobs were saved. Six hundred others will be lost, and Carrier is not paying a price. The company actually received a $7 million incentive package from Indiana to keep the plant open with a reduced work force.

"That is what he said was not going to happen," James said. "That's what he told all of us."

"And a lot of these people voted for Mr. Trump" with the understanding that he would save their jobs, James added.

Duane Oreskovic voted for the president, and is among those losing their jobs.

"I liked this job. This was a job that I actually wanted to retire from," Oreskovic said. "It's not going to happen any more."

At the White House Friday, press secretary Sean Spicer said the job cuts here were long-planned and nothing new.

The first round of layoffs will take effect next month, and the second in December-- three days before Christmas.

I know what you want to know now-- who won the primary in Indiana. Yeah, Bernie beat Hillary there too-- 335,256 (52.5%) to 303,382 (47.5%). Wassermann Schultz struck there too, of course. Bernie’s victory brought him 44 convention delegates… almost as many as Clinton’s loss brought her (47). And in Monroe County, where Bloomington is the county seat, Bernie beat Hillary 15,166 (65.3%) to 8,063 (34.7%) while Trump got fewer votes than either of them (7,259). In fact, Bernie beat the combined vote of all 9 Republicans on the ballot combined! And in Marion County, where the Carrier plant is, Hillary and Bernie were in a virtual dead heat in the primary-- but each of them beat Trump by around 10,000 votes. In fact, Hillary and Bernie beat Trump and Cruz 128,448 to 89,392.




UPDATE: Marist Poll

The new poll released this morning-- but taken before the CBO report was released yesterday-- shows that just 17% of Americans approve of the TrumpCare bill McConnell had to postpone voting on. Only 8% of Democrats, 13% of Independents and even just a sad 35% of Republicans like this quintessential Republican bill! Those are startlingly low numbers that will probably go down once people focus on the warnings of danger to society inherent in the CBO report. The poll also shows that independent voters are increasingly souring on the way Trump is handling the economy, a plurality of all Americans now agreeing that he and his team of plutocrats and misfits have weakened it.

How Much Of A Scam Was Trump's Carrier Announcement Yesterday?

"Trump, who lost the popular vote, has now sent the message it is open season for massive corporations to seek specialized tax breaks from the incoming Administration. This is crony capitalism at its worst. Trump is not only failing to drain the swamp, he is fertilizing the swamp."
-Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA)

In reference to what Gaius was talking about this morning, let's look at some of the fallout from Trump's Carrier announcement. The first time I ever heard about Carrier announcing they would move their plant from Indiana to Mexico was when Bernie started campaigning on it-- loudly. Trump saw that too and quickly started parroting Bernie's complaints on the the campaign trail. Yesterday Bernie penned an OpEd for the Washington Post, Carrier just showed corporations how to beat Donald Trump, warning that American workers have a lot to be worried about because of the nature of the deal Trump cut with United Technologies, Carrier's parent company (in which Trump holds an immense financial stake personally). The deal, he writes, "keeps less than 1,000 of the 2100 jobs in America that were previously scheduled to be transferred to Mexico. Let’s be clear: It is not good enough to save some of these jobs. Trump made a promise that he would save all of these jobs, and we cannot rest until an ironclad contract is signed to ensure that all of these workers are able to continue working in Indiana without having their pay or benefits slashed."

In exchange for allowing United Technologies to continue to offshore more than 1,000 jobs, Trump will reportedly give the company tax and regulatory favors that the corporation has sought. Just a short few months ago, Trump was pledging to force United Technologies to “pay a damn tax.” He was insisting on very steep tariffs for companies like Carrier that left the United States and wanted to sell their foreign-made products back in the United States. Instead of a damn tax, the company will be rewarded with a damn tax cut. Wow! How’s that for standing up to corporate greed? How’s that for punishing corporations that shut down in the United States and move abroad?

In essence, United Technologies took Trump hostage and won. And that should send a shock wave of fear through all workers across the country.

Trump scores publicity win after Carrier keeps jobs in Indiana. Now will other companies take advantage?

...Trump has endangered the jobs of workers who were previously safe in the United States. Why? Because he has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives. Even corporations that weren’t thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be re-evaluating their stance this morning. And who would pay for the high cost for tax cuts that go to the richest businessmen in America? The working class of America.

Let’s be clear. United Technologies is not going broke. Last year, it made a profit of $7.6 billion and received more than $6 billion in defense contracts. It has also received more than $50 million from the Export-Import Bank and very generous tax breaks. In 2014, United Technologies gave its former chief executive Louis Chenevert a golden parachute worth more than $172 million. Last year, the company’s five highest-paid executives made more than $50 million. The firm also spent $12 billion to inflate its stock price instead of using that money to invest in new plants and workers.

Does that sound like a company that deserves more corporate welfare from our government? Trump’s Band-Aid solution is only making the problem of wealth inequality in America even worse.

I said I would work with Trump if he was serious about the promises he made to members of the working class. But after running a campaign pledging to be tough on corporate America, Trump has hypocritically decided to do the exact opposite. He wants to treat corporate irresponsibility with kid gloves. The problem with our rigged economy is not that our policies have been too tough on corporations; it’s that we haven’t been tough enough.

We need to re-instill an ethic of corporate patriotism. We need to send a very loud and clear message to corporate America: The era of outsourcing is over. Instead of offshoring jobs, the time has come for you to start bringing good-paying jobs back to America.

If United Technologies or any other company wants to keep outsourcing decent-paying American jobs, those companies must pay an outsourcing tax equal to the amount of money it expects to save by moving factories to Mexico or other low-wage countries.  They should not receive federal contracts or other forms of corporate welfare. They must pay back all of the tax breaks and other corporate welfare they have received from the federal government. And they must not be allowed to reward their executives with stock options, bonuses or golden parachutes for outsourcing jobs to low-wage countries. I will soon be introducing the Outsourcing Prevention Act, which will address exactly that.

If Donald Trump won’t stand up for America’s working class, we must.

As Joshua Holland pointed out at The Nation this week, whenTrump promised to get tough with companies that offshore jobs, he never said anything about buying them off with our tax dollars. And this isn't just about Carrier air conditioners, which Trump sued in 2007 because of air-conditioner malfunctions in one of his hotels. The single biggest customer for United Technology's $56 billion business is the U.S. government. Trump may have saved a few hundred jobs-- it won't even be a thousand-- but at what cost? Yesterday's Indie Star's headline told the whole story: Federal access likely biggest factor in Carrier deal.

State Rep. Kaniela Saito Ing (D-Maui) is certainly the most progressive political leader in Hawaii-- and the only progressive elected official in the whole state to back Bernie's hugely successful primary campaign-- and he saw right through the little ploy. "Trump," he told us after the announcement in Indiana yesterday, "is setting a dangerously low standard for corporate handouts. Threaten your workers with offshoring, exploit them as pawns, then watch the business-friendly corporate tax breaks roll in. The Carrier charade is an anti-worker moral hazard, that voids corporate bosses of all accountability. A true pro-worker agenda starts from the ground up through living and prevailing wage laws, collective bargaining, paid leave, and putting an end to Trump's union-busting agenda."

Retired Marine Colonel Doug Applegate, who nearly toppled predatory multimillionaire Darrell Issa this month in the suburbs north of San Diego-- and who is Blue America's first endorsed candidate for 2018-- took one look at Trump's "deal" and mentioned that "the annual tax rebates to Carrier from the State of Indiana in the amount of $700,000... Sounds like Republican corporate welfare checks to me!"

Even today's Wall Street Journal, a bastion of neo-liberalism with a screwed up but internally consistent way of analyzing this whole thing, looked askance at the clumsy, ineffective way Trump went about this.

[R]eal job security depends on the profitability of the business. Carrier wanted to move the production line to Mexico to stay competitive in the market for gas furnaces. If the extra costs of staying in Indianapolis erode that business, those workers will lose their jobs eventually in any case.

This isn’t to fault Mr. Hayes’s decision, since Mr. Trump made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. The state of Indiana threw in $7 million in tax incentives, but those weren’t decisive. Mr. Trump’s real hammer is his threat to impose a tariff on Carrier imports to the U.S. Carrier has a 30% share of the U.S. gas-furnace market, and a 35% tariff could kill the business. That’s the same sword Mr. Trump previously held over Ford Motor Co.

United Technologies also gets about 10% of its revenue from sales to the Pentagon, another source of government leverage. Then there’s the potential damage to the Carrier brand, especially its consumer air conditioner sales, if Mr. Trump decided to blast it from the bully-- and we mean bully-- pulpit. So United Technologies decided to take the small cost against earnings and invest to make the Indiana plant more competitive.

...A mercantilist Trump trade policy that jeopardized those exports would throw far more Americans out of work than the relatively low-paying jobs he’s preserved for now in Indianapolis. Mr. Trump’s Carrier squeeze might even cost more U.S. jobs if it makes CEOs more reluctant to build plants in the U.S. because it would be politically difficult to close them.

Mr. Trump has now muscled his way into at least two corporate decisions about where and how to do business. But who would you rather have making a decision about where to make furnaces or cars? A company whose profitability depends on making good decisions, or a branding executive turned politician who wants to claim political credit?

The larger point is that America won’t become more prosperous by forcing companies to make noneconomic investments. A nation gets rich when individuals and business are allowed to take risks as they see fit in a competitive economy. Politicians are rotten investors. Mr. Trump would help the economy, and his Presidency, far more if he focuses on getting the pro-growth parts of his agenda through Congress.

Like the Nixon Administration, Donald Trump’s unpredictable, non-ideological policy-making will sometimes be disorienting for those who claim to believe in free markets. Some conservatives will be tempted to tolerate bad policies that appear to be popular that they’d never accept from President Obama. Many Republicans stayed silent or supported Nixon as he imposed wage-and-price controls and created the EPA, only to regret it later. They shouldn’t make the same mistake with Mr. Trump.

The better strategy is to support him when his policies promote growth and try to block him when he veers into big-government cul-de-sacs. In that spirit, his Carrier shakedown is a short-term political victory that will hurt workers and the economy if it becomes the norm for the next four years.

Even Palin-- currently sucking around for a Cabinet appointment-- slapped Trump around today over the Carrier nonsense, calling it crony capitalism. "When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies," she wrote, "favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent. Meanwhile, the invisible hand that best orchestrates a free people’s free enterprise system gets amputated. Then, special interests creep in and manipulate markets. Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail... [F]undamentally, political intrusion using a stick or carrot to bribe or force one individual business to do what politicians insist, versus establishing policy incentivizing our ENTIRE ethical economic engine to roar back to life, isn’t the answer. Cajole only chosen ones on Main St or Wall St and watch lines stretch from Washington to Alaska full of businesses threatening to bail unless taxpayers pony up. The lines strangle competition and really, really, dispiritingly screw with workers’ lives. It’s beyond unacceptable, so let’s anticipate equal incentivizes and positive reform all across the field-- to make the economy great again."

Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, is happy for the workers who will get to keep their jobs-- fewer than half-- but pointed out that "the Carrier deal is only a bandage on the economic wounds in our industrial heartland. Over the past 16 years, America has lost more than 60,000 manufacturing facilities, and 5.5 million manufacturing jobs since 2000. Not all of those jobs can be reclaimed, but smarter policies will give factory workers a brighter future. A tougher trade policy, a tax code that incentivizes reshoring jobs and production, investments in infrastructure, research, and training are all urgently needed. America has manufacturing know-how, abundant energy resources, a culture of entrepreneurship, a strong homegrown consumer market, and access to amazing innovation. Smarter policies will help us compete. We know these issues enjoy bipartisan support among voters, and they should be the focus of Congress and the Trump administration in 2017."