Some of the nation’s largest corporations have outsourced American jobs overseas and from the years 2001 to 2009 have cut their workforce by 2.9 million people and instead hired 2.4 million people overseas.[1] As a result of the offshoring and outsourcing of American jobs these past two decades millions of domestic jobs have been lost, largely in industrial manufacturing. Our industrial manufacturing base has been decimated with a loss of over 5.5 million jobs or over 32 percent of all manufacturing jobs since October 2000![2] Since 2001 the United States has lost over 54,621 factories![3] Well over 6 million American jobs were lost since then! None of these has stopped, we are still losing jobs!
The loss of millions of jobs effects the state of our economy and government revenue! Our national debt is over $17 trillion and we no longer have revenue from trade via tariffs (which have been slashed to nothing) or from industrial high-wage paying jobs (via income taxes) to even help pay it off combined together with the death of the middle class. When jobs go overseas our GDP declines and the foreign countries GDP increases instead by the amount of the production cost we lost!
Incomes decline especially when high-skilled industrial jobs that pay higher wages at $35-45 per hour disappear and Americans (laid off or otherwise) are forced to work underemployed in a service industry that pays $7-8 per hour to survive with no benefits.
All this combined reduces our tax base – decline in wages, loss of millions of jobs, less employers paying into social security, payroll taxes, less revenue for the government from income taxes – all of this results in less spending on public services (like education, healthcare, military protection, etc.) by which cuts must occur or taxes must be increased on our population.
We have no industrial strategy towards the manufacturing sector or obtaining/retaining innovative and advanced industries, nor protective policies to keep them or shield them from foreign companies that are heavily subsidized by their governments. In fact, it has gotten so bad our national security is becoming at risk through weakened military capabilities since we now import so much high-tech components from foreign countries who can deny us those vital goods anytime. In 2013, for the first time a government report, from the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, stated that offshoring American manufacturing overseas is not only causing a decline in Americans standard of living, but also is leading to much greater strategic consequences for the American military.
The United States lost millions of jobs overseas as companies offshored and outsourced their business and were allowed to do so by the politicians controlling the government with both tax breaks (loopholes) and little incentive at all to keep companies here in the United States. There are tax breaks that even cover the cost of moving jobs overseas still in effect and there is also the offshore tax deferral. The offshore tax deferral allows corporations to defer payments on taxes indefinitely by storing them offshore. Under such policies corporations are currently holding (hiding) over $2.1 trillion in untaxed profits offshore.[4] Both political parties are treacherous for enabling and supporting such a policy!