President-Elect Trump is lying again. What a surprise.

One of the biggest victories that President-Elect Trump has been cooing and tweeting about lately has been his victorious assertion in the form of a deal with Carrier Air Conditioning to keep their operation in Indianapolis. Trump has paraded this victory since the announcement of the deal on December 6th. However, not only are the details that Trump is parading around not matching up with the facts available, it also presents a multitude of problems for the very people Trump claims to have saved.

Deceptive Parading

One of the biggest misleading pieces of information that Trump has been feeding everyone is that he has managed to successfully save 1,100 jobs from being moved to Mexico through striking a forcefully asserted deal with the threat of a 35% tax if Carrier were to move their operating bases in Mexico, to which Carrier apparently complied. This was followed up with a tweet by Carrier to deceive the American population further, which Donald Trump wholly embraced and attempted to use it to further fuel his high horse and justify his agenda.

However, that was not the case at all. The way the deal was struck was through the Indiana Economic Development Corporation providing large sums of money to the company in the face of what almost seems like an ultimatum; Carrier demanded monetary compensation, and without it they would complete their transition to Mexico. In the face of the demand, the corporation paid Carrier a grand total of approximately $7 million in conditional tax credits and training grants to develop the available workforce as well as make room for others. Along with this amount, $16 million more was also allocated to the development of the Indianapolis plant to satisfy the desires of the company.

The Problem Looming Overhead

This decision does not bode well for future politics regarding the relationship of companies with the Trump presidency. The most looming problem is the most immediate and direct use of the money by Carrier, as their plans are to expand the factory to utilize more automated labor spells out only one outcome, and it’s the antithesis of the very core of the deal struck by the Trump administration: less jobs. Not only is the Trump administration funding a business interest that would inevitably lose jobs, they are masquerading the achievement as if it is a victory. But that isn’t the end of all this.

The larger overarching problem that presents itself in this scenario is the dangerous precedent it sets for the future. The issue that it creates is that more and more companies feel as if they can make the same demands as Carrier did, making corporations the most powerful agents of manipulating government funding. They can make the same demands as all other corporations as well as assume that they have the same level of influence. Not only that, but this would also mean lobbyists get exponentially greater influence in Congress to pass bills that would be favorable to the companies that they represent, without nearly the amount of money that they would usually fund to the Congress representatives who serve as heads of specific departments.

This does not bode well for the future of American politics.