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WASHINGTON -- With the recession hit in 2008, Congress put the idea of a "skills shortage" and a need for more H-1B visas in a closet. That didn't mean, though, that interest in raising the H-1B cap went away for everyone. New York City Mayor Bloomberg, for instance, last year called the limits on both temporary and permanent employment-based immigration a "form of national suicide." Microsoft has long advocated for more work visas. But the company's advocacy was quieted during the recession as well, as it announced in 2009 a layoff of 5,000 workers. Circumstances at Microsoft have since changed...

Industrial Policy: The president's media apologists will say it was not a gaffe, that he merely misspoke and corrected himself. But the fact remains that his policies are exporting jobs, particularly to China. President Obama, during a campaign speech at Kent State University in Ohio on Wednesday, mistakenly said he wanted to export more U.S. jobs before correcting himself and saying he was "channeling" Republican rival Mitt Romney. Or was it a mistake? To his media supporters, it's no gaffe. Their dictionary defines gaffe as anything that comes out of Romney's mouth. Certainly not the mouth of Joe Biden, who...

During the month of July, Barack Obama relentlessly attacked Mitt Romney with bogus charges of outsourcing American jobs during his tenure at Bain Capital.  Hypocrisy has become standard-operating-procedure for the Obama White House and campaign team.  However, some new information suggests that if Obama really wanted to rail against the big outsourcer he should have been talking to the man in his mirror. The Obama campaign spent millions on television ads accusing Romney of being the "outsourcer-in-chief."  But, when scrutinized by political truth-testers across the nation, the accusations proved to be false.Glenn Kessler, The Fact Checker at the Washington Post,...

Economic change unleashes powerful forces. We can stubbornly resist them and cling to the status quo, but at best, that ushers in a slow but inevitable decline. A better approach lies in understanding the forces that periodically remake the economy, so we can seize the emerging opportunities they bring. This strategy has worked in the past, and it will work today. A significant force in recent decades has been globalization. It has brought with it a surge in outsourcing, the shorthand term for businesses’ cutting jobs in the United States and moving production overseas to gain access to lower-cost labor....

Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are currently fighting over who is the more patriotic. Obama slams Romney for having outsourced jobs to China during his Bain Capital days. Romney punches back by labeling Obama “Outsourcer in Chief.” The latest is that both John Boehner and Harry Reid are voicing outrage over America’s made-in-China Olympic uniforms. “Burn them!” thunders Reid. Republicans and Democrats strangely agree that outsourcing is unpatriotic, and that the moral and patriotic thing to do is to “Hire American” and “Buy American.” Well, no. Not in a thousand years. The fear of outsourcing and international trade is economic...

In a setback to US President Barack Obama’s push to curb outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries like India and China, Republican lawmakers have blocked a Bill in the Senate that sought to end tax breaks for companies shipping jobs overseas but cut taxes for those bringing the jobs back home. Called “Bring Jobs Home Act”, the measure was first outlined by Obama in his State of the Union address in January. In recent weeks, Obama had whipped up outsourcing into a major campaign issue, questioning Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s record on this score as former CEO of Bain Capital...

No issue is more misunderstood, or been more purposefully confused by the Romney and Obama campaigns, than outsourcing. Outsourcing is merely the importing side of international trade—purchasing abroad goods and services, and components to assemble final products in the United States. Just about everyone who has had a choice between buying an American-made product or an import—a car, a wedge of cheese or a movie on-line—must admit that two-way trade based on legitimate comparative advantages is a good thing. If Americans expect folks abroad to purchase Boeing aircraft and Intel processors, then they had better be prepared to outsource some...

General Motor Co's (GM.N) underfunded pension plan has found a buyer for its illiquid private equity assets - the Chinese government, which is willing to pay between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, the Financial Times reported on its website...

The US President, now in election gear, has repeatedly lashed out at outsourcing by Americans to firms based in India US President Barack Obama and his Republican opponent Mitt Romney are engaged in a fierce battle about outsourcing, which has become a huge election issue. Outsourcing was an issue in 2008 polls and also earlier, but this time with the economy sliding, jobs have become a vital issue for the middle class. Both the presidential candidates are targeting this section. Economy has become ‘the’ issue for the election, overriding all other concerns. Democrats are generally against outsourcing. The Senator from...

It was one of Barack Obama’s best lines — and best moments — in the 2008 presidential campaign. He had said we could save as much oil as we could get from domestic drilling if everybody properly maintained their cars and got their tires inflated. Now, that was hyperbole. But when conservatives, including his opponent, Senator John McCain, tried to turn tire gauges into a symbol of Obama’s pointy-headed liberalism (remember Dukakis and the endive!) and the sum total of his energy plan (if only!), Obama stood his ground. “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” The line...

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that Milton Friedman was touring the Chinese countryside when he came upon a government project where workers were digging a canal. Friedman was surprised that instead of bulldozers and modern earth-moving equipment, the workers were using shovels and wheelbarrows. Thinking this was remarkably inefficient, he asked the bureaucrat in charge of the project why this was so. “You don’t understand,” the bureaucrat responded. “This is a jobs program.” “Oh,” Friedman replied, “I thought you were trying to build a canal. If jobs are all you care about, take away their shovels and give them...

In one of the president’s latest campaign commercials — an ominous spot that looks a bit like the trailer to a B-grade horror movie — Mitt Romney gets some flak for his offshore bank accounts. Apparently, keeping money in places like the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands is a sign that one might not be the most upstanding citizen. This raises a question: Why do some of the president’s wealthiest donors use the same strategies this commercial decries? At least five of the president’s “bundlers” — in lay terms, people who form groups with their acquaintances and pool funds in...

Among President Obama's disingenuous promises made over his four years, he said he would focus on creating "jobs that pay well and can't be outsourced." Yet he spent billions of U.S. taxpayer's money overseas to create outsourced jobs. Typical of Obama's passion for outsourcing was the appointment of his jobs czar, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of General Electric. Even as he was basking in the prestige of his new title, Immelt was closing his last U.S. plant making light bulbs in Virginia and opening a plant in China to manufacture more expensive light bulbs, which Americans will be forced to...

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign spent the weekend mired in a tortured dispute over a seemingly absurd question: When is the CEO and sole shareholder of a company he founded not responsible for the actions of the company? The Romney camp’s answer is that it’s unfair to criticize him for offshoring, outsourcing, and layoffs at Bain-controlled companies between 1999 and 2002 because in practice he was on a leave of absence running the Salt Lake Olympics. Senior adviser Ed Gillespie, speaking on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, explained that when Romney was elected governor of Massachusetts in November 2002,...

Kerry Led Outsourcing Trade Mission to China. Ties to Boston Company Boasting Over 70 Outsourcing Projects John Kerry, who has made opposition to corporate outsourcing of U.S. jobs to places like China a major part of his presidential campaign, appears to have had major involvement with a Boston, Massachusetts company specializing in outsourcing of U.S. manufacturing and jobs. During the late 1990's, Kerry led at least one of the company's outsourcing trade missions to China, appearing for photos at a banquet in Beijing with representatives of Boston Capital & Technology and unidentified Chinese trade representatives. The exact date of the...

The Obama administration allowed millions of dollars in federal stimulus funds to go to foreign companies, despite recent statements by President Barack Obama that he opposes “shipping jobs overseas." “I want to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs and factories overseas,” Obama said in a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Tuesday. “As long as I’m president, I will keep fighting to make sure jobs are located here in the United States of America,” said Obama. However, Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus spending law--the $787 billion American Recovery and Reivnestment Act--gave millions of federal dollars to foreign companies...

Even if Mittens has taken awhile to get the gloves off, Romney surrogate John Sununu is surely wasting no time in taking the fight to the enemy: after telling Obammunist tool Juan Williams 'Don't let your blind allegiance to Obama make you look so foolish' the former WH Chief of Staff and N. Hampshire Governor basically laughed Andrea Mitchell right off the set... As she stuck to pre-programmed DNC talking points slandering Romney as a 'pioneer' in outsourcing, Sununu put some sunlight on Dear Leader's actual outsourcing -funded with our tax dollars, not private capital- as well as the appalling...

The Obama campaign has been running a series of campaign ads which call Romney an "outsourcer." These ads have been helping Obama's poll numbers versus Romney in the Midwest battleground states. However, according to Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post ("4 Pinocchios for Obama's newest anti-Romney ad"), the most recent ad is "misleading, unfair and untrue." For example, it claims that Romney routinely outsourced jobs while he was head of Bain capital, but the Obama campaign can cite only a single instance. Kessler writes: "The Obama campaign rests its case on three examples of Bain-controlled companies sending jobs overseas. But...

The Obama campaign's dishonest attack ads portraying Mitt Romney as a "corporate raider" and a "pioneer" of shipping American jobs overseas have been debunked by multiple independent fact checkers.  WaPo called the first such spot "misleading, unfair and untrue," and FactCheck.org found "no evidence" to support Obama's allegations.  Undeterred by facts and unconstrained by truth, Chicago has produced a second ad on the very same subject, repeating the very same discredited claims.  An NBC News affiliate in Florida examined the new spot and reached the same conclusion as the other truth-seeking entities: The ad is false Truth-Test: Obama's Bain Attacks...

Politics: The president accuses his likely opponent of outsourcing jobs as his re-election campaign hires telemarketers in Canada and the Philippines. And what about GM in China and those electric cars built in Finland? After his attacks on Mitt Romney's involvement in the job-creating private equity firm Bain Capital failed to resonate with an underemployed America, President Obama has retooled his message somewhat. Now, after the Washington Post published a story about Bain's alleged role in outsourcing factory jobs overseas, he's blasting Republican nominee Mitt Romney as an "outsourcer in chief" and "outsourcing pioneer." He did so even as, the...