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"What about making a penalty for any company that goes off shore. You can go off shore but once a company leaves this country they are banned from selling their product back to us."

It's not that easy: Company A is a 100% US company. They sell out to company B in Indochina. They lay everyone off in the states they would use for production. They sell stuff under the old brand name. Which step should they not be able to do?"

The company can sell itself to the company in Indochina but the company in Indochina knows it cannot sell back to us under the old brand name or for that matter the same product under any name. The Indochinese may very well then not want to buy the company and it will have to stay here or fold up. I think most likely they would rather not fold up unless operating badly in the red. If they do sell the company to Indochina then it will leave the opening for another company here to make the product to be sold at least here. Something must be done. Also more tax breaks and incentives to excell and invent. It doesn't do us good to see them leave.

The company can sell itself to the company in Indochina but the company in Indochina knows it cannot sell back to us under the old brand name or for that matter the same product under any name.
Wrong, if two companies merge they can produce products under any trademark of the previous companies. You are right there are laws regulating imports they would have to deal with when moving items around between AB Indochina and AB US. It is of coarse difficult to put a "fair" tariff on such items since there is no market value without a market for the items.

Example: AB Indochina makes widgets which are shiped over to the AB US to be put in refridgerators. What's a widget worth? How much tariff has to be paid on a widget? How much more of a refridgerator can be produced in IndoChina while keeping the "made in America" on the side? Arbitrary decisions about widget imports will be made in congress. On one side will be a lobby funded by AB and it's investors, and on the other side might be a lesser funded lobby from some union from the widget factory AB is planning on closing in the US. The general public won't give d*mn. This is of coarse a perfect recipe for crappy hypocrtical politics based on optimising "swing votes" and campain contributions.

The point as related to this article: if it was crappy when we were tring to deal with widgets moving around inside international corporations, it will be hell tring to do anything regarding lines of code or phone calls beaming back and forth.

Also more tax breaks and incentives to excell and invent.
Sure if you run the government more efficiently, avoid costly wars, and pay off the debt, taxes could be reduced across the board benifiting everything in the private sector. However targeted tax breaks or subsidies (which you can think of as negative taxation) designed for a particular company or industry lead to the same yucky politics. If there something AB and it's unions agree on, it's that they shouldn't have to pay any taxes or regard any enviromental laws, and if possible should be heavily subsidised by tax payers. This hurts inovation because the little guys with the ideas cann't lobby as well as the powers that be.