US president-elect Donald Trump promised to save American manufacturing jobs from outsourcing to lower wage countries; instead of doing that, he took a bow for charging taxpayers for going less than halfway.

Trump had mentioned the Carrier company of Indiana - a manufacturer of air conditioners and HVAC systems - several times during the campaign.  Its parent company United Technologies had threatened to relocate 2,100 jobs to a new facility in Monterrey, Mexico where it can get away with paying workers $19 a day.  Trump's solution, for all of the protectionist rhetoric of the campaign, effectively incentivizes bad corporate behavior. 

The deal hammered by Trump and his vice president-elect and outgoing Indiana governor Mike Pence gives Carrier tax breaks that will cost the taxpayers of Indiana US$700,000 a year for an unspecified number of years; Carrier will keep only 850 manufacturing jobs in the state, along with 300 headquarters and engineering jobs that slated to move to North Carolina.  And yet, United Technologies will still get to deport 1,300 jobs to Mexico - apparently before Trump gets to build his much-vaunted border wall.  No wonder that Trump and Pence refused to allow the Steel Workers Union that represents the bulk of Carrier's workers to take part in the negotiations.

Predictably, some US corporate media outlets misrepresented this total failure as a victory for a strongman leader and author of the much-ridiculed "The Art of the Deal" leaning on a company to halt outsourcing - despite the evidence that exactly the opposite being true.  In fact, it looks like United Technologies probably made Trump and Pence bring their own kneepads to negotiations in which they got the losing end.

Vermont US Senator and former Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said that United Technologies took Trump hostage "and won".  In an op-ed on the Washington Post, Sanders wrote that Trump "has signaled to every corporation in America that they can threaten to offshore jobs in exchange for business-friendly tax benefits and incentives", and "even corporations that weren't thinking of offshoring jobs will most probably be reevaluating their stance this morning".