What a bunch of malarkey. Soon to be president, Donald Trump, traveled to my state to pull money from my wallet and hand it to a corporate entity. Because some times a lot is just not enough.
Carrier’s parent company, United Technologies, made $15.6 billion in profits in 2015. Its CEO Gregory Hayes, whose predecessor walked away with a $195 million golden parachute, made $9 million last year.
That’s $15.6 BILLION, with a B. But that wasn’t enough because despite incentives that had already been provided by the State of Indiana, the city of Indianapolis and the federal government, UT decided that more profit could be made by moving those jobs to Mexico.
Hayes announced a ruthless cost-cutting plan at the end of last year including “reducing the manufacturing footprint in the U.S. and Europe, [that] will result in $900 million of annual savings when it’s done,”
So what were those previous incentives that just weren’t enough?
From the State of Indiana and the City of Indianapolis
The funding, which totals around $1.6 million, was issued to Carrier Corp. in Indianapolis and United Technologies Electronic Controls in Huntington for job-creation plans.
Or this from the federal government
As part of his economic “stimulus package,” Obama’s Energy Department granted Carrier a $5 million federal tax credit in December 2013 to “expand production at its Indianapolis facility to meet increasing demand for its eco-friendly condensing gas furnace product line.”
And we know it sure wasn’t that they were paying an exorbitant amount of taxes
The company paid an effective federal tax rate averaging just 10.3 percent over the 15-year period between 2000 and 2014. And UTC’s most recent annual report shows more of the same: the company paid a federal tax rate of just 9.4 percent on $2.8 billion in U.S. profits last year. This means year after year, the profitable company pays only a fraction of the federal statutory rate of 35 percent.
But the president-elect, with his white haired minion, rode in to save the day by promising $7 million in Indiana tax incentives, that’s $1 from every Hoosier pocket, so that he could say that HE had saved the Carrier jobs. Oh, and this little caveat - future defense contracts will be in the balance.
We don't know exactly what the company is getting. There's plenty of talk that the reason Carrier went along with the deal was because they were afraid their parent company would lose a lot of defense contracts, so this now creates the specter of a president always being willing to punish or reward companies depending on whether or not they give him a good press release.
So the future president leveraged ME so the HE could get a splashy headline... and the knowledge that he can now hold this over UT’s head in awarding future contracts.
SMDH