Tag Archives: Outsourcing

Obama’s corporate tax hike would cause Microsoft to outsource jobs

This Bloomberg article may be helpful to those Democrats who voted for Obama because they hoped that Obama would stop outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and by taxing “greedy coporations”. (H/T Club For Growth)

Excerpt:

Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits.

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

…In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.

See, there’s a difference between what Obama thinks will happen (fantasy) and what actual will happen (reality). He is probably very surprised that corporations are responding to his socialism by shipping jobs overseas. What an unexpected surprise! Let’s recall the simplest possible economics lesson from Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson”.

From this aspect, therefore, the whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Obama shows no evidence of knowing this lesson. And neither does anyone who voted for him. And it isn’t just that he and his voting bloc seem to know nothing about economics, it’s that they seem not to know anything about anything. And this, coupled with disregard for the unemployment rate, the budget deficit and the national debt, is what fuels his domestic policy.

Isn’t it mysterious that Bush cut taxes across the board, and tax revenues skyrocketed, while unemployment dove down below 5%? It’s a mystery! At least it’s a mystery to people who have never cracked open a book.

How communists operate

Here’s a preview of what we can expect from someone like Obama, who has no doubt absorbed the views of many left-wing arts professors, who, like him, have probably never run so much as a lemonade stand. Chavez doesn’t even have a college degree. (I have not seen Obama’s grades, he hasn’t ever released them – but he used alcohol, pot and cocaine).

IBD writes about Chavez:

It ought to worry people that what’s happening at GM is perfectly recognizable in Caracas.

In 2004, Chavez began by expropriating cattle ranches in Venezuela, saying he only wanted to clarify property rights, not confiscate land. End result: Virtually all productive land now is in his hands, redistributed to his loyalists in serfdom.

After that, he went after the U.S. oil industry, snagging prizes like Exxon Mobil’s $1 billion heavy-oil complex on the Orinoco River in 2007, citing a different legal issue: tax disputes.

He did similar expropriations with steel, cement, ports, banks, sugar, rice, pretty much any industry that was viable.

Running out of companies to steal, he now persecutes private media — not, he claims, to stifle dissent, but to protect children from smut, his pretense for shutting down RCTV in 2007.

For the last remaining nonstate TV station, his concern is now environmental desecration, with Chavistas using the pretense of some old antlers on the wall of a Globovision executive following an open-ended state raid as the excuse to shut down the TV station.

Whatever Chavez’s legal concerns are, the punishment is always the same: expropriation and more power to the state, the two pillars of socialism.

Read the whole thing, it goes on to juxtapose Obama and Chavez. (MP3 Podcast is here)

Is Obama saving or creating jobs?

KSDK reports that Obama’s cuts in defense spending will cost St. Louis 30,000 jobs. (H/T Gateway Pundit)

Excerpt:

Thousands of jobs could be in jeopardy at St. Louis’ second largest employer: Boeing.

The aerospace company announced the government’s planned defense budget cutbacks will slow production of two locally-built planes and eliminate the jobs of the employees who make them. Michael Moran has helped build hundreds, if not thousands, of C-17 cargo planes.

…The bottom line is Boeing needs to get through to President Obama, Congress and Secretary Gates. If not, they stand to lose more than 5,000 jobs at Boeing in St. Louis, and 30,000 total local jobs, including suppliers.

Boeing executives are reaching out to anyone who will listen. They’re trying to get Congress to put the planes back in the budget.

The video is here.

And remember the protectionist regulations Obama included in his Porkulus bill? Recently, we talked about how the “Buy American” provisions of the stimulus bill caused American companies to stop buying anything from Canada for their projects. Well guess what? The Canadians were not amused.

Here’s the story from the left-wing Washington Post. (H/T Ace of Spades)

This week, the Canadians fired back. A number of Ontario towns, with a collective population of nearly 500,000, retaliated with measures effectively barring U.S. companies from their municipal contracts — the first shot in a larger campaign that could shut U.S. companies out of billions of dollars worth of Canadian projects.

And it’s going to cost American jobs:

The new buy American provisions, the company said, are being so broadly interpreted that Duferco Farrell is on the verge of shutting down. Part of an increasingly global supply chain that seeks efficiencies by spreading production among multiple nations, it manufactures coils at its Pennsylvania plant using imported steel slabs that are generally not sold commercially in the United States. The partially foreign production process means the company’s coils do not fit the current definition of made in the USA — a designation that the stimulus law requires for thousands of public works projects across the nation.

In recent weeks, its largest client — a steel pipemaker located one mile down the road — notified Duferco Farrell that it would be canceling orders. Instead, the client is buying from companies with 100 percent U.S. production to meet the new stimulus regulations. Duferco has had to furlough 80 percent of its workforce.

“You need to tell me how inhibiting business between two companies located one mile apart is going to save American jobs,” said Bob Miller, Duferco Farrell’s executive vice president. “I’ve got 600 United Steel Workers out there who are going to lose their jobs because of this. And you tell me this is good for America?”

Losing your job sucks, and there’s going to be a lot more of it until people shut off their televisions and pick up some books on economics, like the Federalist Papers or The Road to Serfdom. Learn a little about what made our country not like North Korea. Our prosperity wasn’t an accident, it was the result of a set of decisions made by men who believed in God, human rights and free enterprise.

UPDATE: The Competitive Enterprise Institute has more on the trade war with Canada.

What will cap and trade mean for American consumers?

The Heritage Foundation posted this summary of the top ten points regarding cap and trade.

Cap and Trade Top Ten List
1. Cap and Trade Is a Massive Energy Tax
2. It Will Not Make A Substantive Impact on the Environment
3.
It Will Kill Jobs
4. It Will Cause Electricity Bills and Gas Prices to Sharply Increase
5. It Will Outsource Manufacturing Jobs and Hurt Free Trade
6. It Will Make You Choose Between Energy, Groceries, Clothing or Haircuts.
7. It Will Be Highly Susceptible to Fraud and Corruption
8. It Will Hurt Senior Citizens, the Poor, and the Unemployed the Worst
9. It Will Cost American Families Over $3,000 a Year
10. President Obama Admitted “Electricity Rates Would Necessarily Skyrocket” under a cap-and-trade program. (January 2008)

I can help with number 4: the energy price increases for consumers are right here, courtesy of Michele Bachmann.

Their post goes on to list and analyze the effects of various legislation proposed by Democrats in terms of number of jobs lost and amount of money confiscated from the private sector for the government to spend. It’s amazing how many times Democrats tried to destroy the economy while Bush was President. And now they will finally be able to do it!

The article also mentions how many jobs will be lost by the proposed green jobs programs, as well as how many jobs will be outsourced to China and India, who will enjoy a manufacturing boom since they are not capping their emissions at all.

That’s right, let’s be clear on that:

The Ultimate Outsourcing: India and China have repeatedly said they would not match U.S. environmental goals in order to protect their economies. Cap and Trade will merely move manufacturing jobs to China and India.

There are people I know who voted for Obama who are worried about their jobs. They complain to me about outsourcing. They do not understanding that Obama causes outsourcing by taxing “the rich” and regulating “greedy corporations”. What a tragedy! Defeated by your own ignorance!

The 10 part series on cap and trade

The Heritage Foundation has also started a nice series of 10 posts about what cap and trade will do to the economy. In this series, they are going into a lot more detail than in the summary posted I talked about above.

Part 1 is called Cap-and-Tax is a Jobs Destroyer.

They explain cap and trade:

It works like this: Policymakers set a cap on the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that can be omitted into the atmosphere. Each power plant, factory, refinery, and other regulated entity will be allocated allowances (rights to emit) six greenhouse gases. However, only a certain percentage of the allowances will be allocated to these entities. The remaining percentage will be auctioned off or distributed to other emitting entities. Most emitters will need to purchase at least some allowances at auction. Emitters who reduce their emissions below their annual allotment can sell their excess allowances to those who do not–the trade part of cap-and-trade. Over time, the cap would be ratcheted down, requiring greater cuts in emissions.

So this is basically a tax on energy production. Yes, Democrats think that we produce too much energy, employing too many Americans, and that we sell it for too little money. According to Democrats, we need less production, fewer jobs and higher consumer prices for electricity. And other companies who use energy will have to pay more for it as well.

Take a look at this graph showing projected job losses under the Liberman-Warner cap and trade bill:

Jobs lost from Lieberman-Warner bill
Jobs lost from Lieberman-Warner bill

Click the image for a bigger version.

Now let’s take a look at Part 2, which is called Cap and Trade will force you to make budget cuts.

Again, Heritage explains how cap and trade transfers money out of the private sector, where money is used to produce goods, into the public sector, where money is wasted by bureacrats on bicycle paths and gold monuments to Obama.

…if President Obama were to sign a cap and trade bill into law, he would have to call for familial budget cuts much greater than one dollar. (For a brief explanation of how cap and trade works, go here.) As recently acknowledged by a top White House official, a global warming tax could generate as much as $1.9 trillion in tax revenue over eight years, which amounts to a nearly $2,000 tax every year for every American household.* Add this up over the period of a few years and we’re talking about trillions of dollars in lost income for the entire U.S. economy.

And here’s the chart:

How much will cap and trade cost you?
How much will cap and trade cost you?

I hope the people with low income who were hoping to become rich under Obama won’t be too shocked to find that the poor do better under capitalism not socialism. I mean, I hope they don’t drop their television remote controls and doughnuts.

Save us Michele Bachmann!

Actually, she did save us on that mortgage cramdown bill that I blogged about while back. So my pleading is not in vain.

UPDATE: Good news! Michelle Malkin says the cap and trade tax is in trouble! It turns out that the Democrats in manufacturing-intensive states are aware of what the tax will mean to their unemployment rate.

Yesterday, I noted Henry Waxman’s debate-evading maneuvers to try and facilitate passage of the massive eco-tax/”climate change” bill.

The NRCC sent out a helpful fact sheet outlining why the radical green plan is really in trouble. You can thank opposition from Democrats in manufacturing and energy-producing states.

Michelle has all the citations from the Democrat politicians who are never going to vote for this mess. So, good news!

UPDATE: My post on the fraud involved in the “polar ice caps are melting” myth.