Protectionists Take Note: There Really Aren’t That Many Jobs Being Shipped Overseas
The Tax Foundation smacks down an oft-repeated (by Barack Obama and other protectionists) myth about jobs being shipped overseas.
Barack Obama frequently says he will remove the “tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas.” Yet, he has never either identified the specific parts of the tax code that is supposedly encouraging such outsourcing nor has he identified any specific company that has engaged in such actions.
In fact, according to Department of Labor statistics, the hysteria over outsourcing is greater than the actual occurrences of jobs being shipped abroad. According to DOL’s April 2008 report on extended mass layoffs, “In 2006, employers laid off about 936,000 workers in 4,885 private nonfarm extended mass layoff events.”
As the chart below shows, only 3.6% of these workers were separated because their jobs were relocated to a foreign or domestic location. Indeed, only 1.4% of all workers separated in 2006, 13,367 in total, were laid off because their jobs were relocated overseas. The vast majority of these job changes were relocations within the same company and not “outsourced” to another firm.
By contrast, 2.2% of all laid off workers, 20,669 in total, were separated because their jobs were relocated to another part of the United States. Again, the vast majority of these job changes were made within the same company.
An inconvenient (for populists) myth, to be sure, but don’t expect it to change anything. The “your job could go to some dirty foreigner” line is just too useful to the proponents of big-government, anti-free trade policies to be relegated to the dust heap by mere fact.
mmie
Kenny
Lioncourt
likwidshoe
gustave776
Justin B.
