Wheeling and dealing wrong way to save jobs
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is right when she calls it crony capitalism.
President-elect Donald Trump is touting his deal to give Carrier air conditioning $7 million in tax breaks to save 800 jobs. He’s promised to do more of the same.
Trump’s policy could be a deal-changer for our nation, the creation of a jobs program reminiscent of the New Deal during the Great Depression, when the government spent tens of millions to keep Americans working. And while Trump has focused primarily on manufacturing jobs in the Rust Belt, there are many other industries that could use some help. Including mine.
Newspapers employed 56,400 people in 2001, and that has dropped 42 percent to just 32,900 last year. If Trump is willing to give private companies cash to keep employment up, then I say #MakeNewspapersGreatAgain.
After all, printing a newspaper is a kind of manufacturing. And our job losses are directly related to increased competition, much of it arguably from overseas.
British news organizations in particular are taking away American advertising dollars. The Daily Mail’s tabloid website in 2015 attracted about 51 million unique U.S. visitors a month. The Guardian had 42 million U.S. visitors, according to com Score, a web traffic tracking firm.
Frankly, I’m sick of seeing those silly pink pages of the Financial Times lying around our best hotels. I mean, how can a red-blooded American newspaper compete with a highfalutin accent?
Admittedly, I haven’t discussed this with the Chronicle’s publisher, but my bet is that we could use the $8,750 per employee that Trump gave
Carrier. Of course, we’ll have to threaten to lay people off first, but I bet just a hint of more job losses will get Trump down here on Air Force One to make sure Gov. Greg Abbott gives us some of the cash in his economic incentives accounts.
Eventually, Trump can pay Abbott back the same way he will make Mexico pay for a border wall. He just needs to impose a tariff on international web traffic and the printing of foreign newspapers.
I suggest keeping it simple. The top three British newspapers and the BBC get about 134 million unique visitors from the U.S. every month. Trump could make them pay the U.S. Treasury 20 cents for every monthly unique visitor, generating $326 million a year from just four news organizations. Imagine if that tariff were applied to every foreign news site — it could reach $1 billion a year!
That would buy a lot of U.S. newsprint, with the knock-on effect of boosting the stock of paper companies.
If foreign websites don’t pay the tariff, the U.S. government can block them the same way China blocks the New York Times. Since almost all of the growth in British newspaper readership over the last decade has come from the United States, there is no way they could walk away from all of that traffic. They will pay!
While we’re at it, cheap foreign oil has also cost 125,000 American workers their jobs, and the federal government hasn’t lifted a finger to help. Many oil executives have complained that if car manufacturers had laid off 250,000 autoworkers, President Barack Obama would have done something immediately.
Because Trump will soon have the helm, he should con- sider the proposals I’ve heard at cocktail parties around Houston. Since U.S. oil companies need $60 a barrel to profitably discover and produce oil, Congress should set $60 a barrel as the minimum price paid by refining companies. If OPEC or anyone else tries to sell cheap oil to the United States, the tariff would automatically raise the price to at least $60.
That will mean consumers will pay more for gasoline, but I am sure they won’t mind because they’ll know that the extra 40 cents a gallon is keeping Americans employed.
If you think all of this sounds absurd, you’d be right. If you think this makes sense, then you really are a socialist.
Whenever the government injects itself into an industry to prop up jobs, that’s the end of the free market. I have long opposed paying economic incentives to individual companies or passing laws to protect industries. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is right when she calls it crony capitalism.
The government’s job is to provide an educated workforce, quality infrastructure and a regulatory environment that fosters fair competition in a free market.
When Trump announces that he will give monetary benefits to companies to keep them from moving jobs overseas, that sets a bad precedent. When he plans to impose tariffs that will drive up prices in the name of protecting American jobs, he is distorting the free market.
As a journalist who has weathered the last 20 years, I can say that internet competition has forced journalists to focus less on pleasing our advertisers and to work harder to win over readers. OPEC’s decision to allow crude prices to drop 60 percent has forced the oil industry to become more efficient. And foreign competition has forced U.S. manufacturers to adopt new technologies and produce higher-quality goods.
In any competition there will be losers, and they deserve our help brushing themselves off and starting again. But fixing the game doesn’t do anyone any good, and it’s not capitalism.