Obama, the Outsourcer-in-Chief

by Hans Bader on January 24, 2012

in Blog, Politics

Ironically, in his State of the Union Address tonight, President Obama railed against “outsourcing.”  That was funny, because he has spent billions of tax dollars on subsidizing the outsourcing of American jobs to foreign countries.

“79 percent” of all green-jobs funding in Obama’s $800 billion stimulus package went to foreign companies, with the largest payment going to a bankrupt Australian company.  For example, the Obama Administration spent $1.6 billion on Chinese and other foreign wind power. The practical effect of those subsidies was to outsource American jobs.  ABC News reported on the subsidies for Chinese wind turbines contained in the stimulus package:

Despite all the talk of green jobs, the overwhelming majority of stimulus money spent on wind power has gone to foreign companies, according to a new report by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.

Nearly $2 billion . . . has been spent on wind power. . .But the study found that nearly 80 percent of that money has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.

“Most of the jobs are going overseas,” said Russ Choma at the Investigative Reporting Workshop. He analyzed which foreign firms had accepted the most stimulus money. “According to our estimates, about 6,000 jobs have been created overseas, and maybe a couple hundred have been created in the U.S.” Even with the infusion of so much stimulus money, a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.

The stimulus package also showered money on left-wing community organizers and liberal lobbying groups.

Earlier, NewsMax reported on a $2 billion subsidized loan by the U.S. government to a Brazilian oil company:

Gulf Oil CEO Joe Petrowski says President Barack Obama’s weekend comments in Brazil that the United States looks forward to purchasing oil drilled for offshore by that nation “is rather puzzling,” and “hypocritical” as his administration has imposed a virtual moratorium on domestic drilling. The signal to purchase more foreign oil comes after the U.S. Export-Import Bank invested more than $2 billion with Brazil’s state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration.

The CEO of General Electric, which has received government “green jobs” money, is a close Obama advisor.  GE has been busy outsourcing American jobs, eliminating a fifth of its U.S. workforce since 2002.  GE made $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, but paid no taxes at all, even though America’s corporate tax rates are among the highest in the world.  Indeed, GE actually received a tax benefit of $3.2 billion from the government in 2010, and received a preferential bailout at taxpayer expense.

In addition to subsidizing foreign “green” jobs, Obama’s stimulus package also contained poorly-designed provisions that ignited trade wars, wiping out jobs in America’s export sector and aggravating the U.S. trade deficit. The Dodd-Frank financial law passed in 2010 is also expected to shift thousands of jobs from America to foreign countries.

The Obama Administration has also encouraged companies to move overseas by interfering with employers’ merit-based hiring, and by imposing a wide array of costly,  harmful new labor and employment regulations on American manufacturers.  Liberal businessman Steve Wynn called Obama “the greatest wet blanket to business and progress and job creation in my lifetime,” saying that “the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the President of the United States. And until he’s gone, everybody’s going to be sitting on their thumbs.”

The Obama administration is busy reinterpreting federal labor, employment, disabilities-rights, and discrimination laws in ways that impose costly burdens on businesses and consumers. The Obama EEOC recently sued Pepsi for doing criminal background checks on job applicants, forcing it to pay $3.1 million to settle the lawsuit. The EEOC is also threatening employers who require high-school diplomas with lawsuits under the ADA.

Employers’ ability to hire and fire based on merit has increasingly come under assault by the EEOC, which has ordered employers to discard useful employment tests and accommodate incompetent employees. For example, a hotel chain was recently compelled to pay $132,500 for dismissing an autistic desk clerk who did not do his job properly, in order for it avoid a lawsuit by the EEOC that would have cost it much more than that to defend.  The EEOC has sued companies that sensibly refuse to employ truck drivers with a history of heavy drinking, even though companies that hire them will be sued under state personal-injury laws when they have an accident. It has previously sued other employers who take serious criminal records into account, or use criminal background checks, even though employers who hire criminals end up getting sued when those employees commit crimes. The EEOC’s demands thus place employers in an impossible dilemma where they can be sued no matter what they do.  The EEOC’s aggressive anti-business stance reflects its new left-wing majority under the Obama administration, which has appointed anti-business extremists to the EEOC.

Obamacare’s burdens on employers may eventually eliminate as many as 800,000 jobs.  Obamacare has caused layoffs in the medical device industry, and wiped out jobs in other industries.

Previous post:

Next post: