Reality Check

Oops. "Never mind." -- Gilda Radner as Roseanne Roseannadanna, "Saturday Night Live."

   The President-elect has promised he will bring back jobs, close the border, send immigrants home, and reduce corporate taxes to encourage American companies to close their overseas operations and return home, all part of hit master plan to "make America great again."
   It all sounded good, and helped to get Donald Trump elected to the presidency of the United States. When that's in place, there will be "a flood of companies leaving Ireland and Canada and Germany and France and they are going to come back to the United States," according to Stephen Moore, senior economic advisor to Trump, in an interview published in the Irish Times.
   Now comes the reality. The Trump plan, according to the Irish Times business and tech writer Karlin Lillington, "reveals a surprising lack of global business knowledge and understanding, especially for a supposedly business-focused administration and candidate."
   The report listed numerous reasons why the Trump plan is unworkable. Here are a few:
   First, cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent won't matter, since the Irish corporate tax rate is 12.5 percent.
   Second, many multinational firms have only nominal headquarters in Ireland to take advantage of the tax structure, and have only a handful of employees. That's a similar reason many U.S. firms are headquartered in Delaware, but all their operations are elsewhere.
   Third, major tech firms locate operations in other countries to be close to their customers.
   Fourth, these firms want workers with close understanding of the language, culture and customs of the customers, and the best way to accomplish that is to hire local workers with those skills.
   Fifth, relocating all those workers to the U.S. would be silly, since it would put a greater distance -- perhaps five or six times zones -- away from their clients.
   Sixth, asking them to emigrate from their homes would clash with the announced Trump plan to slow or stop immigration.
   Seventh, there are not enough people in America with the needed technical, linguistic and cultural knowledge to fill the positions even if the jobs did come back.
   Eighth, even if the workers with the needed skills were willing to transfer to U.S. facilities, why would they want to, when living expenses are so much higher in America? They would rather stay home.
   There's nothing new there. Historically, the reason people left home and moved to America was because this was where the jobs were.
   In short, many high-tech jobs are long gone from America, and they're not coming back. Cutting taxes won't be enough, and asking workers to go someplace where they will face intense bigotry is foolish on its face.
   Similar factors apply to other jobs in manufacturing industries. Companies relocate to regions where workers are available and wages are lower. That happened to the textile industry in New England, when they relocated to the Carolinas, and eventually moved again out of the U.S. to other countries where costs were lower.
   Every business executive with any basic knowledge of economics knows this.
   One wonders whether members of Team Trump know what everyone else knows well.
   Here's a link to the full report in the Irish Times:
http://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/donald-trump-s-team-reveals-surprising-lack-of-global-business-knowledge-1.2870459