I'm a bit leery about rosy job outlooks, because there's an awful lot of companies doing layoffs, and its weird how I'll hear about a company doing a big hiring push, only for equal or bigger layoffs to happen a few months later. There's something fishy going on. I'm not even talking about the purely partisan politic aspect or these reports being fudged/manipulated, I'm saying, I don't think the job market is really changing like the numbers suggest, because I think corporations are gaming the numbers. I think they did it under Obama, and I think they've had extra incentive to do so in order to get their tax cuts.
Apple announces plans to repatriate billions in overseas cash, says it will 'contribute' $350 billion to the US economy over the next 5 years:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/apple-announces-350-billion-investment-20k-jobs-over-5-years.html
Good to hear (not at all unexpected, in fact, I predicted we'd see exactly this type of thing), although I'm not going to praise Apple or blindly believe them. A lot of that (probably most even) was money they should have paid in taxes. I think they're taking advantage of the "repatriation" part of the tax bill in order to escape the EU trying to get their fair share of that money too. And it also effectively means that we're rewarding Apple for committing tax fraud, which I'm sure won't at all come back to bite us. Like, I'm almost willing to bet that this will enable them to pay much lower taxes moving forward. I won't be surprised if they end up sitting on a quarter of a trillion dollars that not only won't be taxed, but they'll probably be exempt from being taxed on the profits of that money via investment and interest, so they could probably sit that money in a bank account and make tens of billions in interest a year. And if the government moves to do something about it, they'll fight it in court and then move it elsewhere (just like they did to the EU).
I also recall multiple companies saying that the tax plan is actually going to force them to pay a bunch in tax money (just nowhere close to what they should have, but still a lot compared to what they have been). Forget what mechanism it is that was supposed to be causing that. I wonder if that's not another thing Apple is looking to skirt with this.
Oh, and 20k jobs from that amount of money is a fucking joke. Hell 200k and then you can pat yourself on the back. But even then, its gonna come with caveats. Like Apple is announcing an HQ2, and we'll see the same situation as with Amazon's HQ2 with cities falling over themselves to offer whatever they can to get them to locate it there. Which, that's the other thing, the tax bill doesn't even really matter for corporations like these, as they get to setup their own sweetheart deals.
I expect we'll be hearing Apple announce factories or something (data centers, or assembly/processing facilities; maybe even go into some fab joint venture or something) in the US before too long as well, but they'll be like the Wisconsin Foxconn deal, where they'll get ridiculous amount of exemptions, so we'll be effectively subsidizing them to maintain their dominant position (not that that is anything new really). Next step is they'll get to claim their own sovereign land (Foxconn was working to get their Wisconsin factory be designated as such). And Apple's got enough money they could build entire freeways and cities to support it (Bill Gates is in the process of building some experimental city in Arizona; imagine if tech "ecosystem" starts turning into full on cities). Considering the one pharma company gifting that drug patent to a tribe, I could see companies looking to setup deals that way too.
All of that being said, I have more belief that Apple is a slight bit more...respectable than many others when it comes to this, so I do think they will genuinely invest in America some. In fact, Republicans might end up regretting this, as don't be surprised if a lot of that money ends up lobbying against a lot of Republican goals. What's that Churchill quote about when he propositioned some woman and she acted offended by the amount not the proposition itself? Well Republicans have shown who they are, so now its just a matter of haggling over their price.
But hey, some of you conservatives will get to gloat because these "liberal elitist" tech companies will be revealed to be greedy fucks too. You'll, I'm sure, politely admit that Republicans were their biggest enablers too though, right?
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