All Jokes Aside: What if There Were a ‘Taco Truck on Every Corner’? Washington Post Does the Math.

Aside from lots of fresh, delicious, low-cost food, what are the real implications of the Latinos for Trump warning?

It was immediate.

Thursday night, MSNBC’s Joy Reid interviewed the founder of Latinos for Trump, Marco Gutierrez, who warned that without Donald Trump as president, or, something, America would somehow be overrun with immigrants – an amusing if not offensive take, considering America, sans native Americans, are all immigrants of a sort.

“My culture is a very dominant culture,” Gutierrez told Reid (video here). “And it’s imposing, and it’s causing problems. If you don’t do something about it, you gonna have taco trucks on every corner.”

It took seconds for one smart MSNBC producer to announce video would be coming in moments, and a few minutes more for sites like NCRM (pretty sure we were the first, or among the very first) to post report the story.

On Twitter, it seemed nearly everyone was saying, “Great! Taco trucks on every corner! Whoopie!”

Because, what’s wrong with that?

The Washington Post Friday decided to take a deep dive into the implications of “taco trucks on every corner,” and, making a few educated assumptions, came to the realization that even a more reasonable interpretation of “taco trucks on every corner” would net America a huge jobs bonus.

The Post’s Philip Bump did the math, and concludes America would gain about 3.2 million taco trucks, and 9.6 million new jobs. That number neglects all the peripheral jobs that would be added by the increase in taco consumption, mostly businesses that grow, pack, and sell vegetables, and meats, etc., but 9.6 million new jobs sounds pretty good.

“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,” Bump writes.

“Of course, there would be other repercussions. Many of the taco trucks would struggle to find business, like those posted at remote crossroads in Kansas,” he claims, although one would like to think Kansans would welcome delicious tacos. 

Bump surmises other restaurants would devolve into “price wars” and “undercut their offerings,” concluding there “would be plenty of jobs for those fired from higher-end restaurants, but the resulting drop in wages would be staggering.”

“That, more than the cultural fear-mongering some might see in Gutierrez’s dire warning, is the real threat to America. A taco truck on every corner means a dramatic shift in how America views itself, sure, but it also means a new economy built on serving up burritos or developing new, more fuel-efficient box trucks. It means a change to the American way of life that Gutierrez, for one, finds unacceptable.”

Anyone else hungry?

 

Image by Henry Sudarman via Flickr and a CC license