Donald Trump Isn't Creating All Those New Jobs, At Least Not Yet

Is President Trump unfarily taking credit for job
creation that would have happened with or without him?

Anybody would be cheered by the flurry of news that companies are hiring, or moving jobs back to the United States from overseas.  

Donald Trump takes a lot of credit for this, and as much as I dislike him, if he's responsible for actually bringing new, well paying jobs to the United States, who am I to complain?

Job growth is job growth, so it's something to be celebrated.

However, like so many things involving our new president Donald Trump, things aren't as they seem, at least if a really interesting NBC news report is correct. 

As always, the problem involved Donald Trump's tweets.

He has the ability to send a corporation's stock plummeting if he is displeased with the company and tweets about it.

No CEO or PR department wants that, so some corporations are issuing jobs annoucements to stave off the dreaded Donald Trump negative tweet.

So the companies are making annoucements that they're creating new jobs. The trouble is, says NBC, that these annoucements are recycled. Usually, the added jobs were already planned before Trump came along.

Trump is conning again. He's taking credit for jobs that would have been created whether he was around or not.

That's what I mean when things aren't as they seem. Companies look great if they announce now they are creating jobs, even though this has nothing to do with Trump. It just gets Trump off their back.

Trump knows this. That's why he tweets those negative things. So he can look good and claim he is already creating jobs.

Maybe he's hastening things a little. General Motors said it has long planed to increase capital expenditures, including hiring more workers, but Trump accelerated the plans a little.

Planned job increases at Wal-Mart are planned to be at roughl the same pace as recent years, so there's nothing too special there.

Of course, Trump has responded to the NBC News story as fake and wrong in, you guessed it, a series of tweets in the days before he wass inaugurated on Friday.

Trump's bluster and threats might also be keeping jobs in the U.S., at least temporarily, as company's don't want to face the bad PR Trump can create.

However, I wonder if that's a sustainable job creation ploy. A really sound economic foundation helps create jobs, and that takes work and skill.

I wonder if Trump can go beyond threats and tweets and actually help build the nation's economy.

I'm dubious.