A stand-in for crumpled Whataburger wrapper Donald Trump gravely intoned on television last night that if Hillary Clinton wins the upcoming election, there will be “taco trucks on every corner.” And as delicious as that sounds, according to the Washington Post it may also be economically sound.
Marco Gutierrez of Latinos for Trump was on MSNBC talking to host Joy Ann Reid when he dropped the most scrumptious bombshell of all time:
My culture is a very dominant culture, and it’s imposing — and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you’re going to have taco trucks on every corner.
When I first heard about it, I too, had the exact same thought you did. “Let the Barbacoa Revolution begin, my friends.”
But my taco-addled mind was too filled with images of dancing cilantro to process it any further. But Phillip Bump at WaPo clearly has a brain of steel, because he did the math on what would happen if there actually was a taco truck at every single intersection in the United States – all 3.2 million of them:
If you assume that three people work in each truck, that’s 9.6 million new jobs created. The labor force in August was 159.4 million, with 144.6 million employed. Adding 9.6 million taco truck workers would help America reach nearly full employment — and that’s just the staffing in the trucks. Think about all of the ancillary job creation: mechanics, gas station workers, Mexican food truck management executives. We’d likely need to increase immigration levels just to meet the demand.
Nearly full employment! That’s not half bad. In fact, I’d say that’s pretty great.
Of course, it’s not all upside. America’s nearly-full-employment status would only be brief, owing to natural economic forces. Bump points out that if a taco truck is in the middle of nowhere, such as the entire godforsaken state of Kansas, it’ll probably shut down pretty quickly due to lack of demand. And because of all the new businesses serving food, restaurants as a whole may begin to suffer, and people who work there may be fired.
But that’s okay, because they can all just go work in the taco trucks. Though those jobs will probably be lower paying, because it’s a taco truck and not a high-end restaurant. The other side of supplying all those taco trucks – from manufacturing, to vegetable oil supply, to mechanics, and everything in between – more than makes up for it.
Who cares though??????? A chicken in every pot. A taco truck on every corner.