HOW HELPING AMERICA HURTS AMERICANS

This past Tuesday, President Obama delivered a surprisingly moderate, uneventful State of the Union address where he, like most expected, called for tax reform, a commitment to higher education, infrastructure investments, and a commitment to bringing jobs back to America.

For a while now, the new political trend of working to bring recently outsourced manufacturing jobs back to our shores and promotional tag lines like "buy American" have engulfed the economic debates.  To help boost American job levels, many (on both sides of the aisle) have made commitments to creating a climate that allows manufacturing to return, giving the starving middle class of this country another chance.  In his speech Tuesday, Obama added to this rhetoric, calling for new taxes on companies that ship jobs overseas.

But if true economic theory is taken into consideration, these calls for the rebirth of American manufacturing are detrimental to our economic health.  Like many know, manufacturing jobs have moved overseas because, among many things, labor is much cheaper in other parts of the world.  In the grand scheme of things, outsourcing and moving manufacturing to cheaper locations creates more competitive prices for the American consumer; if these jobs were to return to America, more people would be employed, however, prices would be a great deal higher.

The same goes with the whole 'buy American" concept.  Passing trade laws and taxes that "encourage" consumers to buy American rather than foreign products affects competition and therein forces the consumer to pay a higher price for goods.

If we really want to build a strong workforce in this country, we need to drop our love for manufacturing jobs.  Our economy is in a transition from a manufacturing economy to an information based economy (which is why manufacturing jobs have moved overseas). While most of our workforce is trained in manufacturing, these kinds of jobs are gone.  The only way to create pure growth is to innovate; mainly, move to the next economic step.

So how do we put a manufacturing based workforce back to work in a new information economy?  Promote and invest in education, allowing the workforce to learn skills in broadband internet, new energy technologies, and high speed rail. If the government really wanted to create jobs, they should be revamping our education program, invest in clean energy research and technology, and invest in new infrastructure.

Obama and the rest of the country need to get a grip on this.  It's time for our government to invest in the future, not live in the past.