Critics of Donald Trump’s deal to prevent 800 jobs at a Carrier Plant in Indianapolis from being outsourced to Mexico say that the President-elect had simply paid off the business with Indiana tax dollars to score a public relations victory. Add one unexpected name to that list: Sarah Palin.
Palin, who this week was was briefly rumored to be under consideration as Trump’s secretary of veterans affairs, published an op-ed for Young Conservatives on Friday that argued forcefully against the deal with the headline “But… Wait… The Good Guys Won’t Win With More Crony Capitalism.”
“When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies, favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent,” she wrote. “Meanwhile, the invisible hand that best orchestrates a free people’s free enterprise system gets amputated. Then, special interests creep in and manipulate markets. Republicans oppose this, remember? Instead, we support competition on a level playing field, remember? Because we know special interest crony capitalism is one big fail.”
Palin compared the deal to tax incentives that the Obama administration had given the solar energy company Solyndra—a move that gave conservatives outrage fodder for years—writing that “burdensome federal government imposition is never the solution.”
“Gotta’ have faith the Trump team knows all this,” she continued. “And I’ll be the first to acknowledge concerns over a deal cut by leveraging taxpayer interests to make a manufacturer stay put are unfounded – once terms are made public.”
According to a report from Fortune, citing an anonymous source with knowledge of the deal, Carrier’s parent company United Technologies has agreed to receive $700,000 a year in exchange for maintaining more than a thousand jobs in Indianapolis, the bulk of which had previously been slated for Mexican workers. One member of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation suggested that Carrier could be keeping the jobs stateside to keep on Trump’s good side, given that 10 percent of the company’s business comes from contracts with the federal government.
