One of the primary things that Trump’s presidency will be judged upon is his ability to encourage the creation of good paying jobs for American workers, and so far the results have been quite promising. Since Trump’s surprise election victory in November, a whole bunch of companies have either promised to bring jobs back into the country or have pledged to create new ones. Ultimately time will tell if those jobs actually materialize, but for the moment there is a tremendous amount of optimism in the air. In fact, I don’t know if we have ever seen anything quite like this at the beginning of a new presidency. The following are 10 companies that have promised to add jobs in the United States since the election of Donald Trump…
#1 Kroger (NYSE:KR) says that it intends to fill 10,000 permanent positions in the United States this year.
#2 IBM (NYSE:IBM) has announced that it will be hiring an additional 25,000 workers in the United States over the next four years.
#3 Foxconn Tech (TW:2354) is considering setting up a 7 billion dollar plant in the United States that would create between 30,000 and 50,000 jobs.
#4 Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) has pledged to add 100,000 full-time jobs in the United States by mid-2018.
#5 Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) has announced that it plans to add approximately 10,000 retail jobs in the United States in 2017.
#6 Sprint Corp (NYSE:S) has announced that 5,000 jobs will be brought back to the United States instead of going overseas.
#7 After meeting with Trump, the CEO of Softbank Corp. (T:9984) stated his intention to create 50,000 new jobs in the United States.
#8 After a phone call from Trump, industrial manufacturing giant Star Bulk Carriers Corp (NASDAQ:SBLK)promised to keep hundreds of jobs in the United States instead of moving them out of the country.
#9 Hyundai Motor Co (DE:05380) has promised to spend 3.1 billion dollars supporting their current factories in Georgia and Alabama, and they have said that they are now considering adding an additional factory in the United States as well.
#10 General Motors Company (NYSE:GM) has pledged to invest a billion dollars in U.S. factories and to add or keep 7,000 jobs in the United States.
Unlike most politicians, so far Donald Trump seems determined to actually keep many of the promises that he made during the campaign. And on Monday he kept a very important promise by pulling the U.S. out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. If you are not familiar with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the following is a pretty good summary from USA Today…
The TPP is a comprehensive trade agreement among 12 Pacific Rim countries, not including China, that was signed last year by President Obama after seven years of negotiation. But the Senate had not yet ratified it. The 30-chapter pact, which also needed to be ratified by other countries before Trump’s order Monday, primarily aims to boost exports, remove tariffs and non-tariff barriers, open access to more markets and usher in transparency in trade rules.
The 12 nations that were to be included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership collectively account for approximately 40 percent of global GDP. So it was going to be a very big deal, and it is something that Barack Obama had been working on for many years.
But with one stroke of a pen it is over, and as I will explain below that is a very good thing.
Trump is also promising to keep his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA…
On Nafta, Trump said Sunday that he’ll meet with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto to begin discussing the deal, which he has routinely blamed for the loss of U.S. jobs although there was little change to employment in the U.S. in several years after it went into effect. Trump signaled that he’s willing to work with the U.S.’s closest neighbors.
“We’re going to start renegotiating on Nafta, on immigration, and on security at the border,” Trump said at the start of a swearing-in ceremony for top White House staff. “I think we’re going to have a very good result for Mexico, for the United States, for everybody involved. It’s really very important.”
Nobody is suggesting that we shouldn’t trade with the rest of the world, but what Donald Trump understands that so many other politicians do not is that many of these “free trade deals” have been extremely destructive to the U.S. economy.
For years, we have been buying far, far more from the rest of the world than they have been buying from us. As a result of our massive trade deficits, there has been a continual flow of cash, jobs and businesses leaving the country.
Over the past several decades, formerly great manufacturing cities such as Detroit have been reduced to urban hellholes. Meanwhile, China has become exceedingly wealthy and gleaming new factories have sprouted like mushrooms in their major cities.
This didn’t happen by accident.
Bad decisions lead to bad results. And if we had kept on doing the same things, we would have continued to systematically impoverish our nation.
For more than seven years, I have been hammering home the message that our trade policies have been absolutely killing us. So I am quite thankful that we finally have a president that understands these things.
Of course there is much more to fixing our economy than just addressing our trade deals. As I discussed yesterday, our rapidly growing debt is becoming a major crisis, and that is going to present quite a challenge for Trump.
But for the moment, we should definitely celebrate the fact that Trump has gotten us out of the TPP and that he plans to renegotiate NAFTA.
Donald Trump understands business, and it is going to be fascinating to watch how a businessman handles the position of the presidency. It has only been a few days, but already some of his former critics seem to be coming around a little bit. For instance, just consider what Mark Cuban is saying…
The Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur is “playing it by ear” when it comes to the effect President Donald Trump’s policies will have on the stock market. But he thinks there’s possible upside.
“I think the discussed economic programs are potentially a big plus for public companies and the overall economy,” Mr. Cuban said in an e-mail Monday morning.
The potential policies Mr. Cuban is optimistic about: corporate tax cuts; getting rid of the “friction” for small businesses; and reducing and simplifying administrative activities.
Considering our current trajectory and the immense amount of long-term damage that was done during the Obama years, it is hard to be optimistic about the future of the U.S. economy.
However, I am certainly willing to give Donald Trump a chance to show what he can do.
At least he is doing things differently than his predecessors did, and that is to be greatly applauded because the road that we were on clearly would have ended in economic oblivion.
We may very well end up there anyway, but there is certainly nothing wrong with being hopeful that Trump can somehow turn things around.