Boasting about United States' superiority doesn't make it so.
Slippage in global excellence is showing up on charts everywhere—and now the most discouraging of the lot.
Of 2.4 million jobs created this year by U.S. companies, more than half—1.4 million—were created overseas. Had those 1.4 million overseas jobs been kept at home, the unemployment rate would have been cut significantly.
New overseas jobs aren't concentrated on cheap exports. Instead, high-tech and industrial operations are being built by the likes of corporate giants DuPont and Caterpillar, which have found high-quality work forces to man increasingly sophisticated jobs.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, half of all revenues from companies in the S&P 500 come from overseas, where new consumer and commercial markets are rapidly expanding while U.S. consumer and commercial spending is drastically down.
The calamity of U.S. firms' creating more jobs overseas is obvious. Businesses and factories will continue to close. Thousands more jobless workers could become dependent on government help that can only be provided by borrowing more billions from other countries.
President Obama and Congress must end political feuding and confront this astonishing overseas job-transfer trend.
Tax and investment laws, export-import regulations, public education standards, labor contracts—every conceivable incentive for shifting jobs overseas—must be ended. U.S. corporations must be given reason to revive global industrial preeminence at home.
Remedies must be found lest newly poor Americans only find work producing cheap products for a newly rich middle class overseas.
