The unemployment rate has hit a 25 year high, now standing at 9.4 percent and since President Obama has taken office the U.S. has lost 2.2 million jobs. How does the Administration and tax-writers in Congress plan to remedy this? Well, by implementing policies that will ship more jobs and capital out of the U.S. and into foreign countries. That’s how.

 

In an interview this week with Bloomberg News, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer announced the company would move jobs overseas if Obama’s plan to tax the foreign profits of American companies goes through. As Bloomberg reports:

 

“It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”

 

…This comes the same week Ballmer said that, while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country.

 

Imposing higher taxes on foreign profits to protect American workers is nothing more than a form of protectionism that will ultimately fail and cost the U.S. more jobs as companies follow Microsoft’s lead.

It's interesting to look at the number of private sector jobs versus the number of government jobs lost. Often times, the number of government jobs has actually increased, at the expense of a massive loss of jobs on the private side. The government will eventually crowd out the private sector, although arguably, this is already happening.
>> crowded out Friday, June 5, 2009 5:22 PM Report Comment