Obama Subsidizes Job-Killing Outsourcing, While Attacking Job-Creating Outsourcing

In his 2008 campaign, Obama demagogued about “outsourcing,” but his own policies have outsourced thousands of American jobs, at taxpayer expense, as I explain today at The Washington Examiner.

As ABC News notes, “Nearly $2 billion in money from” the stimulus package has “been spent on wind power,” but “nearly 80 percent of that money” — $1.6 billion — “has gone to foreign manufacturers of wind turbines.” Indeed, “a recent report by American Wind Energy Association showed a drop in U.S. wind manufacturing jobs last year.” These subsidies effectively outsource American jobs, driving up America’s trade deficit.

Weirdly enough, Obama supports this taxpayer-subsidized outsourcing, which wipes out American jobs, even while opposing non-subsidized (free-market-based) outsourcing, which can actually save American jobs by reducing the cost of finished goods that are produced mostly — but not entirely — in America. (How can firms’ decisions to outsource save American jobs? Here’s how:  An American manufacturer of a finished product, facing stiff cost competition from overseas manufacturers, can reduce its overall costs, and thus avoid going out of business, by outsourcing low-skill jobs producing crude components of the finished product to low-wage overseas workers, thus enabling the more valuable finished product designed or assembled by skilled American workers to be cost-competitive with finished goods produced entirely overseas.)

Wintery Knight has an interesting commentary on additional ways that stimulus money and taxpayer money are being wasted on foreign companies and liberal interest groups. I earlier discussed how GE was using “green jobs” welfare to fatten its profits while paying no taxes (unlike most American companies, which pay some of the world’s highest taxes) and getting a special bailout at preferential terms from the taxpayers.