Tag Archives: Outsourcing

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Obama’s job creation advisor ships American business unit to China

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From Jack Cafferty of CNN. (H/T Reason to Stand)

Excerpt:

Here is more evidence of the suicide mission this country is on: General Electric announced it’s moving its 115-year-old X-ray business from Waukesha, Wisconsin to Beijing, China.

The X-ray business is part of General Electric’s GE Healthcare unit, and this move is just part of a broader plan by GE to invest $2 billion in China.

This will become the first GE business to be headquartered there. A handful of the unit’s top executives will be transferred to China but otherwise, the company says, none of the 150 staffers in the Milwaukee-area facility will lose jobs or be transferred. However, GE plans to hire more than 65 engineers and a support staff at a new facility in China.

It’s the kind of news that makes you want to reach for something sharp and jab it in your eye. General Electric’s Chief Executive, Jeffrey Immelt, is one of President Obama’s advisers on… ready? U.S. job creation!

[…]Two months after Immelt was named to the council, The New York Times reported that General Electric paid no income taxes last year… thanks to some fancy accounting footwork, even though the company earned $14.2 billion in profits last year – more than $5 billion in the U.S. alone.

Obama named Immelt as the head of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in January. And it’s no surprise that he is shipping jobs overseas – that’s what happens when you elect a tax and spend socialist as President. When Obama attacks businesses with his anti-capitalist rhetoric, they curtail hiring here and hire in China instead. Who would try to expand a business with an anti-business liberal with his finger on the button? You would have to be stupid to risk your capital in a country that runs 1.65 trillion dollar deficits.

It’s important to understand that big businesses like General Electric are not conservative. Big business wants government to insulate them from competition by using regulations to block new entrants. Small businesses are conservative.

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How do job creators perceive Obama’s anti-business policies?

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Here’s an interview with Bernie Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, from Investors Business Daily.

Intro:

Bernie Marcus co-founded Home Depot (HD) in 1978 and brought it public in 1981 as the U.S. was suffering from the worst recession and unemployment in 40 years. The company thrived, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and redefining home improvement retailing.

But Marcus says Home Depot “would never have succeeded” if it launched today due to onerous regulation. He recently helped launch the Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit of CEOs and entrepreneurs dedicated to preserving the free enterprise system. IBD recently spoke to him about jobs and the economy.

Excerpt:

IBD: What’s the single biggest impediment to job growth today?

Marcus: The U.S. government. Having built a small business into a big one, I can tell you that today the impediments that the government imposes are impossible to deal with. Home Depot would never have succeeded if we’d tried to start it today. Every day you see rules and regulations from a group of Washington bureaucrats who know nothing about running a business. And I mean every day. It’s become stifling.

If you’re a small businessman, the only way to deal with it is to work harder, put in more hours, and let people go. When you consider that something like 70% of the American people work for small businesses, you are talking about a big economic impact.

IBD: President Obama has promised to streamline and eliminate regulations. What’s your take?

Marcus: His speeches are wonderful. His output is absolutely, incredibly bad. As he speaks about cutting out regulations, they are now producing thousands of pages of new ones. With just ObamaCare by itself, you have a 2,000 page bill that’s probably going end up being 150,000 pages of regulations.

IBD: If you could sit down with Obama and talk to him about job creation, what would you say?

Marcus: I’m not sure Obama would understand anything that I’d say, because he’s never really worked a day outside the political or legal area. He doesn’t know how to make a payroll, he doesn’t understand the problems businesses face. I would try to explain that the plight of the busi nessman is very reactive to Washington. As Washington piles on regulations and mandates, the impact is tremendous. I don’t think he’s a bad guy. I just think he has no knowledge of this.

And Bernie is not the only one – we saw the recent rant from a Democrat CEO named Steve Wynn.

Excerpt:

And I’m saying it bluntly, that this administration is the greatest wet blanket to business, and progress and job creation in my lifetime. And I can prove it and I could spend the next 3 hours giving you examples of all of us in this market place that are frightened to death about all the new regulations, our healthcare costs escalate, regulations coming from left and right. A President that seems, that keeps using that word redistribution. Well, my customers and the companies that provide the vitality for the hospitality and restaurant industry, in the United States of America, they are frightened of this administration.And it makes you slow down and not invest your money. Everybody complains about how much money is on the side in America.

You bet and until we change the tempo and the conversation from Washington, it’s not going to change. And those of us who have business opportunities and the capital to do it are going to sit in fear of the President. And a lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, God, don’t be attacking Obama. Well, this is Obama’s deal and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America.

The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution and maybe we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest, their holding too much money. We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists. Everybody’s afraid of the government and there’s no need soft peddling it, it’s the truth. It is the truth.

But there are many more CEOs saying the same thing.

Excerpt:

Wynn’s remarks echo those on a lengthening list of CEOs including:

  • 3M’s George Buckley, who blasted Obama last February as anti-business. “We know what his instincts are,” Buckley said. “We’ve got a real choice between manufacturing in Canada or Mexico — which tends to be more pro-business — and America,” he told the Financial Times.
  • Boeing’s Jim McNerney, who in the Wall Street Journal last May called Obama’s handpicked National Labor Relations Board’s suit against his company a “fundamental assault on the capitalist principles that have sustained America’s competitiveness since it became the world’s largest economy nearly 140 years ago.”
  • Intel’s Paul Otellini, who told CNET last August that the U.S. legal environment has become so hostile to business that there is likely to be “an inevitable erosion and shift of wealth, much like we’re seeing today in Europe — this is the bitter truth.”
  • Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who observed to radio host Hugh Hewitt last month that Obama “never had to make payroll,” that “nobody has ever created a job in this administration” and that the president is “surrounded by college professors.”
  • GE’s Jeffrey Immelt, one of Obama’s biggest supporters, who hit out at the president last year. “Business did not like the U.S. president and the president did not like business,” the FT reported him saying. “People are in a really bad mood. We have to become an industrial powerhouse again, but you don’t do this when government and entrepreneurs are not in sync.”
  • Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, another Obama backer, who blasted Obama’s bank tax in January 2010 as a “guilt tax,” once called Obama’s carbon tax idea “regressive” and this month denounced Obama’s obsession with corporate jets.

These aren’t the only ones. CEOs of battered oil companies like Chevron and Exxon Mobil, media companies like Fox News and Forbes, and business groups like the Chamber of Commerce have also spoken out. When the creators of jobs and wealth are saying the same thing, isn’t it time for the White House to listen up?

When will the American people realize that you can’t support tax increases for the rich, and then be surprised when they just stop hiring – or worse they outsource jobs to more business-friendly countries. Obama’s anti-business economic policies cause outsourcing. The only reason for job creators to take a risk by trying to expand their businesses is because they might be able to make a profit. Take away their profit, and there is no reason for them to hire anyone. The profit motive is what creates jobs. Obama is attacking the profit motive, and that’s why no one is hiring. Anyone who understands economics understands that.

And it’s not just Obama’s anti-business rhetoric that is to blame for the high unemployment rate. It’s higher regulation of job creators and job-killing leftist boondoggles like Obamacare.

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Men are the biggest losers in the recession

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From the American Spectator.

Excerpt:

Over the past decade, the total number of jobs for women went up by close to a million. Meanwhile, men lost more than 3 million jobs. From 1960 to 2008, the average unemployment rate for men 25 years and older was 4.2 percent. In the last two years, it has more than doubled, shooting up to 8.9 percent. By contrast, unemployment for women of the same age and for the same period of time went from 4.7 percent to 7.2 percent, an increase of 52 percent. The disparity is more striking if one considers that women’s rate of participation in the workforce has risen sharply since 1960 while the percentage of men in the job market has been shrinking.

One reason that men’s employment rate lags behind is that there has been negative growth in the types of jobs men historically have occupied. In the last 10 years, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost. That’s one-third of our manufacturing base in an industry where men make up 70 percent of the workforce. In construction, where 87 percent of positions are filled by men, more than 1.4 million jobs went away during that time frame. Approximately 4.4 million jobs have been added in the education and health care sectors, but women dominate this growing field as they make up 77 percent of the work force.

It’s working-class men, not those who occupy elite positions in finance and government, who are suffering. The hemorrhaging of manufacturing and other well-paying jobs in America means that a rising number of young American men face dwindling prospects for earning a middle-class wage in the future. Young male unemployment is at 19 percent. More than 15 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans (most of whom are male) were unemployed in January 2011. African-American males also have been hit hard. Ten years ago, both African-American men and women had the same unemployment rate of 8.2 percent. Since then, the men’s rate has more than doubled and now is almost four points higher than the unemployment rate for women. Similarly, Hispanic men now have a 1.7 percent higher unemployment rate than Hispanic women, whom they historically have outperformed.

With growing numbers of out-of-work young men comes a volatile mix of negative social outcomes: they are less likely to marry, less likely to be a stable parental force for the children they father, and more likely to engage in violent behavior.

One would think that Washington policymakers would see these developments as a cause for concern. Nonetheless, for more than a decade, they have looked the other way as good American jobs have been shipped overseas, outsourced or have simply gone away. Ironically, our business tax system incentivizes our companies to export jobs and prosperity overseas. Also, our government welfare system all but discourages an intact family of a father and mother by the way it distributes money.

Men are not going to be able to fulfill their roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader if they do not have the authority that comes from being the principle/sole breadwinner in the family. Right now, we have a situation where the schools are discriminating against men by having a tiny minority of male teachers, as well as co-ed classrooms. Men cannot learn as well when they are taught primarily by women and are distracted by female peers and do not have a separate male-focused curriculum. And that is why men now earn 40% of bachelor degrees on many campuses. Government’s massive spending and job-killing policies leave the few men who can graduate in an unstable employment situation where marriage becomes too risky. De-valuing a man’s savings with inflation doesn’t help, either.