Senate to Vote on 'Bring Jobs Home'
Posted: 19 Jul 2012 01:50 PM PDT
The U.S. Senate is scheduled to vote Friday on Sen. Debbie Stabenow's (D-Mich.) Bring Jobs Home Act tomorrow morning, according to officials. The bill would pay American companies for businesses costs -- and provide a 20 percent credit on expenses –- when they close operations abroad and bring work back to the U.S. It also closes a loophole that allows employers to obtain a tax credit when shutting down operations here and shipping jobs overseas. "We are working very hard to reach across aisles to get our colleagues to support this effort," Stabenow said. "For the life of me, I don't understand how anybody could oppose this."
Another bill sure to be filibustered...It creates jobs; it closes loopholes; it stops rewarding businesses, and vulture capitalists, for outsourcing jobs (or is it off-shoring? I can never remember...); it closes a tax-credit for allowing them to do it... It not only doesn't raise the debt, but it saves money...
It actually DOES something about creating jobs...and we can't have that.
Yeah, I know...The idea is too good, and it's suggested by a Democrat, so it will be killed. And people wonder why they hate the Senate in particular, and the Congress in general....
The move to schedule a vote is yet another empty attempt to convince people that Congress is actually doing something important when they are not.
Any operator of any company who established operations offshore is not going to be coming back because the reasons they moved their manufacturing offshore haven't changed. The tax rate on business is still too high, the cost of labor is still too high, the cost of manufacturing here and exporting the product would reduce the pool of potential consumers of their exported product and the regulatory environment is still too expensive.
When the Democrats start addressing these fundamental issues as to why manufacturers moved their operations to begin with there might be some chance of reestablishing manufacturing within the union. Until then, however, the products will continue to be manufactured elsewhere and imported for consumption. No one is going to be building a factory which consumes large amounts of energy with a bunch of populists running around saying that we should have some sort of carbon exchange or carbon tax. The more regulating Washington does, the more manufacturing the union is going to lose. When you look at the decline of domestic manufacturing you can almost draw a mirror image of the loss curve that represents the increase in the amount of regulations domestic manufacturers are subjected to. The reason that GM build cars in Europe is that it is less expensive to build the cars in Europe for the European market than it is to build the cars here and ship them to Europe. The reason GM put factories in Canada and Mexico for the domestic market is that it is less expensive to do that and import the products than it is to manufacture the products domestically.
If the Democrats really want to attract manufacturing back to the union, then they would reduce that corporate tax rate from being among the highest in the world to being among the lowest. A sheet metal stamping machine works just as well in Mexico as it does in Detroit, Whether that machine is located in Mexico or Detroit is determined in large part by which location will allow the company to produce the piece of stamped metal at a price that will allow that company to be competitive in the market with the product. Companies fly no flag - they don't exist to benefit one government over another or one union over other nations. They exist to produce goods and services at a cost that will allow them to sell their goods and services at a profit level sufficient to attract investors and build the company. When the Democrats finally get that basic truth figured out, perhaps then we can actually create an environment that attracts businesses instead of making the union one of the least attractive places to locate their business in a global marketplace.
