Philip Bump of The Fix at the Washington Post addresses "The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner":
A supporter of Donald Trump appeared on MSNBC's "All In" on Thursday night to offer a vision of a bleak, delicious future.
"My culture is a very dominant culture, and it's imposing — and it's causing problems," Marco Gutierrez of Latinos for Trump told Joy Ann Reid. "If you don't do something about it, you're going to have taco trucks on every corner."
That's a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale?
The upshot:
And it would mean that, per Gutierrez's vision of the future, we'd suddenly see 3.2 million conveniently located taco trucks. How ubiquitous is that? Well, it's one on every corner. But we can also compare it to Starbucks, which seems pretty ubiquitous in a lot of places. In 2012, there were about 11,000 Starbucks locations in the United States.
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But it's where we're headed, apparently, if Trump loses. That's good news for the economy in one way. 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.
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. Other restaurants would likely suffer as a glut of other options and price wars undercut their offerings. There would be plenty of jobs for those fired from higher-end restaurants, but the resulting drop in wages would be staggering.
Happy Labor Day.
