All you have to do is to listen to one of Donald Trump’s speeches without suffering irreversible IQ-loss and you’ll see the reason his business ventures always fail. The man simply doesn’t understand business.

Yesterday, during the same Rochester, NY, speech where he was whining about how unfair it is that he has to play by the same rules as everyone else, he introduced Trump-onomics as the solution to revitalizing Rocherster.

Trump, the GOP front-runner, sought to connect with local voters, saying he has friends here, “incredible people,” referencing Bausch + Lomb and Xerox, and holding up SentrySafe closing its Pittsford plant, and moving jobs to Mexico, as an example. He drew cheers telling the crowd: “I would stop them so fast, your heads would spin.”

“You look at all the companies that are leaving, and all the jobs that are being lost,” Trump said in an interview backstage before the rally. “And they are moving to Mexico and everyplace else but Rochester. I’ll turn it around, believe me. I’ll turn it around for New York. I’ll turn it around for Rochester.”
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He came armed with statistics about the Rochester economy, some of which missed the mark. He claimed, for example, that Rochester had lost 4,000 jobs in the past six months. But according to seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Rochester metro gained 1,337 jobs.

Regardless, Trump promised a turnaround: “I’m telling you, I will bring it back so fast.”

He went after SentrySafe, whose parent Master Lock Co. announced last June it would close its Linden Avenue plant this year and send those 350 jobs to Nogales, Mexico, and Wisconsin. The company described the move as a consolidation in an effort to remain competitive. Trump said that, if he were president, he wouldn’t buy SentrySafe but would slap a considerable tariff on their products.

“If they know they’re going to pay a 35 percent tax, they’re not moving folks,” he said.

You see this over and over with Trump every time he talks about economics. First, he lies about the current situation in order to create a crisis in the mind of his audience. For instance, in Wisconsin, before Ted Cruz wiped the floor with him, he was claiming, contrary to data, that Wisconsin is losing jobs. It isn’t. It is gaining jobs.

Then he comes up with bogus solutions that seem reasonable to his audience. In this case, he claims he is going to repeal the laws of supply and demand by taxing a particular company for moving its jobs to a Mexico manufacturing facility. Not only will that NOT work, because safes are manufactured in other nations an imported the United States already so a 35% penalty would simply put the company out of business.

He CAN’T even do it because the president doesn’t have the authority… and I write this knowing that Barack Obama has another eight months to convince John Roberts of stuff… to penalize specific companies for legal activity and it is against a US treaty, NAFTA, to impose import duties on manufactured goods from Mexico. While it may give some a feeling of accomplishment to put a company out of business for moving its manufacturing facility, petty vengeance should not be part of our trade policy. And where those displaced workers in Rochester will find other jobs, those jobs in Mexico might help reduce the need for The Wall that the Mexicans are not going to pay for. If by some miracle SentrySafe was able to stay in business, who would be paying that 35% tax? Well, their customers would.

What Trump is saying is that if imposes a high enough penalty he can make an employer not only stay in the United States, he can make it stay solvent, too. Or, I guess, he’ll just tax it if it goes the way of Trump Steaks and Trump Air and Trump Vodka and Trump Magazine and Trump casino and Trump Mortgage and Trump University and… you get the picture.

This is why Donald Trump is running from debates and from the Sunday talk shows. It doesn’t take a smart person to trip him up, he knows so incredibly little about anything that just about anyone poses an intellectual risk to him.