El Trumpo reiterated his threat made constantly during the election that any company that makes the financial decision to relocate to another country will face a 35% tariff.
And he did it via Twitter:
The U.S. is going to substantialy reduce taxes and regulations on businesses, but any business that leaves our country for another country,
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
fires its employees, builds a new factory or plant in the other country, and then thinks it will sell its product back into the U.S. ……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
without retribution or consequence, is WRONG! There will be a tax on our soon to be strong border of 35% for these companies ……
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
wanting to sell their product, cars, A.C. units etc., back across the border. This tax will make leaving financially difficult, but…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
these companies are able to move between all 50 states, with no tax or tariff being charged. Please be forewarned prior to making a very …
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
expensive mistake! THE UNITED STATES IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2016
There’s one glaring obvious problem – it is unconstitutional to target a specific company with different laws, i.e., tariffs, because they did something the President didn’t like. But they can’t slam an entire industry with a tariff to punish one company moving jobs overseas. So will they go the way of FDR when he hit this problem?
Clearly, nobody gives a crap that the government is now telling companies what to do and calling it free market economics. Because controlling the means of production is only socialist when Democrats do it, duh!!
Mike Pence also reinforced this morning that they don’t care if this is crony capitalism, they’re going to do it anyway. More and more Trump just sounds like our FDR – he even used the “forgotten man” narrative from Amity Shlaes’ excellent book about Coolidge and FDR. But the point is that he’s not guided by any conservative principle or ideology – he’s just gonna use his personal whim and the power of the federal government to try to make the economy do what he wants. I would say that he’ll be as successful as FDR was, but the federal government is VASTLY more powerful now than it was back then…