Those questions don't matter much to the workers who will keep their jobs, and who will celebrate the deal - and rightly so. There haven't been many rays of hope for laid-off manufacturers in the industrial heartland over the last several decades. They have heard a parade of politicians promise to save their jobs or bring them back, and they have rarely seen them deliver. For the workers who won't lose their jobs at Carrier, this will be sweet relief from that trend.

But those questions matter a lot to millions of distressed American workers who are still waiting for their jobs to be saved or restored, or simply for a new job that pays as well as one they lost long ago.

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They matter because they could give clues to how many more companies, jobs and workers the Trump administration might similarly be able to help.

One possibility is, Trump won Carrier over with smooth talk and broad policy promises. This implies a future strategy that mixes the bully pulpit with broad-based policy changes meant to boost investment. He's going to cut taxes, he's going to (vaguely) reduce regulation, life will be better, this will be a huge PR win for the company. Carrier changes course, he stops criticizing them, deal made. You could see that scenario repeating a lot.

Another possibility is Trump is doling out company-specific promises. He'll roll back a specific regulation that affects the company in particular, or muster up some federal loan guarantees or worker training dollars, or maybe, as CNBC reported in the Carrier case, he might cajole a state governor into offering new corporate subsidies.

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He also could be swinging a hammer of government. Maybe he's whispering about canceling military contracts (Carrier's parent company, United Technologies, relies heavily on those) or about levying very targeted tariffs on imports from the company's operations overseas.

This is a sliding scale of government interference in the market.

At one end of it, Trump would be acting like a lot of governors, who throw state subsidies at companies that announce plans to skip the state. That's typically not a great strategy for states in the aggregate - as the group Good Jobs First has relentlessly documented, corporate subsidies tend to under-deliver on jobs promises, and they often advantage big corporations over small businesses and start-ups. It would immediately create some perverse incentives for multinational companies, as the economist Justin Wolfers noted on Twitter:

The other end of the scale is much more involved, in a way that might particularly alarm conservatives. In it, Trump would be heavily involved in picking economic winners and losers. The economist Tyler Cowen sketched such a scenario in a column this week on how Trump might move to block companies from moving capital overseas.

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"It’s not hard to imagine a Trump administration using such regulations to reward supportive businesses and to punish opponents," Cowen wrote. "Even in the absence of explicit favoritism, companies wouldn’t know the rules of the game in advance, and they would be reluctant to speak out in ways that anger the powers that be."

If these arguments sound familiar, it's because Republicans raised them time and again through the early years of the Obama administration - particularly the debate over the president's signature economic stimulus bill, and his accompanying move to bail out the U.S. auto industry.

In February 2009, Obama flew to Indiana to tout the stimulus, which had not yet passed Congress. He said it would "save or create" 3 to 4 million jobs, including 80,000 in Indiana alone.

Two days later, a Republican congressman blasted the stimulus bill on the House floor. "This back-room deal is simply a long wish list of big government spending that won’t work to put Americans back to work," he said. "It won’t create jobs."