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Monday, October 22, 2012

WHY IT MATTERS: Outsourcing

U.S. multinational companies have taken advantage of lower trade barriers over the past 15 years to shift jobs and production to lower-wage countries, a practice generally known as outsourcing. That's cut costs for consumers and helped those companies grow, which can support employment in the United States. Still, it has also raised fears that the United States is permanently losing the kind of high-paying manufacturing jobs needed to support a healthy middle class.
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Where they stand:
President Barack Obama has proposed giving tax breaks to U.S. manufacturers that produce domestically or bring back jobs from overseas. He also wants U.S. companies to pay taxes on more of their overseas earnings. Currently, U.S. corporations don't pay U.S. taxes on overseas profits unless they bring that cash back to the United States. Obama argues that this encourages outsourcing. Many Republicans say his proposal would raise taxes on U.S. companies and encourage them to move their headquarters overseas, so they would no longer be considered U.S. corporations.

Mitt Romney says he wants to make the United States a more attractive place to do business by cutting corporate taxes and reducing regulations. Romney also says he will discourage companies from moving operations to China by pushing that country to let its currency rise in value. That would make its exports more expensive.

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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In other words niether candidate will do nothing to help.

And this writer needs to quit lying about ease of relocating to China because of our restrictions.

Restrictions, like thing us pesky American workers want like wages more than $3 a day, health insurance, responsible environmental policies for the manufacturers,etc.

OUr factories are closed but the demand for the product remains.

In Cambridge the old Airpax building was sold recently. Sensata headed by Martha Sullivan making $3,000,000 year shut down what was left and sent the jobs to Matamoros MX and Shanghai leaving people like me making a whopping $12 hr at middle age to fend for myself.

Anonymous said...

Both sides choose not to level with the american public. Manufacturing jobs are NOT coming back in mass. Today's top manufac. jobs require advanced training and skills. Not only do you have a ton of people not willing to get those skills but new manuf. tech. also ensure that biz. no longer needs to hire 1000 people to get the job done. They can go after those 50 engineers and produce all the products they need.