#offshoring

Billionaire Trump donor and tariff advocate is moving his Ohio manufacturing plant to China: report

Brendan Rascius

Mon, 16 February 2026 at 2:22 pm GMT-7

Cue the sad trombone: Hedge fund billionaire John Paulson — a major Trump donor and advocate of tariffs — is shuttering his Ohio brass instrument plant and offshoring work to China, according to a new report.

Paulson’s company Conn Selmer, the nation's top maker of orchestral and brass instruments, notified employees it will shift most of its East Lake plant operations to Asia by July, triggering about 150 layoffs, The Guardian reported.

Employees were informed of the decision last month, when they expected to negotiate a new union contract, according to United Auto Workers Local 2359, which represents the workers.

The employees said the company unveiled a new plant in China in 2025, and that work has slowly shifted to that location. However, workers in Ohio had previously been told their jobs were not in jeopardy.

A new analysis by IRS researchers and academics published Monday morning estimates that the richest 1% of U.S. households don't report around 21% of their income, often using complex tax avoidance strategies that allow them to outmaneuver the federal government's increasingly rare audits of the wealthy.

Led by two IRS researchers as well as Daniel Reck of the London School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, the new paper (pdf) finds that 6 percentage points of the richest households' unreported income "correspond to undetected sophisticated evasion" such as offshoring, pass-through businesses, and other avoidance tactics.