Old machines show why Trump tax breaks may not spark new company spending

Hanging on the wall of David Shippoli’s office at a sprawling factory here is his company’s annual scavenger award, a stuffed hyena head, given to the employee who finds the cheapest way to execute an investment project in the past year.

        Shippoli, a manufacturing engineer at Dan T. Moore Co., a privately-held company which operates nine factories across Ohio and Indiana, won the prize for finding used m achines that were a fraction of the cost of buying them new.

        He is a fan of President Donald Trump’s policies and even propped a bright red “Make America Great Again” hat on the hyena during the campaign. But Shippoli embodies a mindset that exists across industrial America that will make it hard to boost business investment, even if the corporate tax breaks floated recently by the Trump administration come through.

        “I don’t know why anyone would buy new equipment when there’s so much stuff out there that’s perfectly capable of doing the job,” he said.