RIDING THE BUSINESS TRUMP TRAIN
We don’t pretend to know what the presidential administration of Donald Trump will look like after four years, but we like the fact he is — yet again — fulfilling a campaign promise by attempting to create a more palatable environment for businesses.
Companies, beginning before the president ever took the oath of office, began to announce the hiring of more workers, discuss expansions and make plans for innovation.
The list reads like a who’s who of top U.S. employers: Amazon, Boeing, Carrier, Delta, Fiat Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Spotify, Under Armour, Wal-Mart, as well as the Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank and the Chinese tech giant Alibaba.
Many of those companies, no doubt, are feeling a relief after eight years of a president who kept his foot on the brakes, whose record number of regulations were a business stifler and whose Affordable Care Act singly kept recovery from the Great Recession from starting earlier and being stronger.
Trump, on the other hand, has promised to roll back regulations, spend money on infrastructure, and cut taxes on businesses and individuals.
“This is about a confidence because we are seeing less information about regulations and more about growth and opportunity,” financial expert and Townhall.com contributor Dan Celia said.
It won’t be easy. Both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama presided over economies going into or coming out of recessions, and the recoveries under both presidents never included the wage growth that the end of previous recessions had seen.
Over time, manufacturing jobs have left the country, automation has eliminated many openings, and numbers of those who were trained for one kind of employment could not or would not seek retraining for new work. Some businesses, understanding they could do as much with less, realized they would never need to rehire those workers they let go at the depth of the economic decline.
It will be difficult, for instance, for Trump to make good on his promise to put back to work the many blue-collar workers who were laid off because of Obama’s war on coal. The previous president said on the campaign trail in 2008 he planned to put coal mines out of business, and he did his level best. So, there are fewer coal jobs to be had.
Trump has said he wants the country to have an energy policy that utilizes both clean fossil fuels and renewables such as solar and wind power. So some coal jobs could come back on line, but as renewable energies become cheaper without being subsidized, it will become more difficult to sustain the coal jobs.
Automation offers a similar situation. If jobs can be done cheaper and equally well by a machine, they’ll be done by a machine. Workers who once did those jobs aren’t likely to get them back.
So Trump and his team will have to be creative and innovative in getting people back to work and others back to the kind of work they were used to before the Great Recession.
Meanwhile, Celia said the Wall Street markets, which grew during the later Obama years despite the former president’s lukewarm attitude toward business, can sense a new approach.
“The markets are going up — and it’s a real increase — because it is based on the perception of what’s coming as a result of a progrowth environment in Washington,” he said on his nationwide “Financial Issues” program. “That’s why the markets have been going up since the election, and more so after the inauguration, and then even more so in the past week and a half. Why? Because now the perception is beginning to look more and more like reality. The protesting and media attacks on this president are not due to him not fulfilling his campaign promises, but the whining and moaning [are] because of the exact opposite — he is fulfilling his promises. That perception that has been driving the markets is beginning to turn into reality.”
The 2017 JP Morgan Chase & Co. Business Leaders Outlook bears out that enthusiasm.
The survey found that 76 percent of executives believe the new administration will have a positive impact on their business. Only 12 percent believe it will have a negative impact. Compared to a year ago, about double the percent of executives (80 percent) from middle market businesses feel confident about the economy. The percent of small business executives who feel confident jumped from 43 percent in 2016 to 62 percent this year.
Further, 57 percent planned to hire more full-time employees, and 71 percent said they plan to raise wages, numbers that are up 8 and 10 points, respectively, from last year.
Trump, to be sure, is unlike any president most of us have seen. He’s never likely to win over the protesters — those who voted for and were sure Hillary Clinton would be president — but he may become the best friend business has seen in many years. And if he does, the effects of that friendship could redound positively to Trump supporters, Trump haters and everyone in between.