Obummers Corporate buddy pays no taxes and then move a division to China. Swell.
Posted on 07/26/2011 1:16:15 PM PDT by kcvl
General Electric Co.’s health care unit, the world’s biggest maker of medical imaging machines, is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing.
Tweet 14 people Tweeted this.ShareThis .“A handful’’ of top managers will move to the Chinese capital and there won’t be any job cuts, said Anne LeGrand, general manager of X-ray for GE Healthcare. The headquarters will move from Wisconsin amid a broader plan to invest about $2 billion across China, including opening six “customer innovation’’ and development centers.
The division should have “double-digit’’ growth rates as the country converts from film and analog to digital X-ray technology, LeGrand said.
GE Healthcare, also the world’s biggest maker of magnetic resonance imaging and cardiac tomography scanners, got about $1.1 billion of its $16.9 billion in sales from China last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Per Drudge...
Obummers Corporate buddy pays no taxes and then move a division to China. Swell.
How much of those GE earnings that are sitting on the sidelines in this economy were earned overseas? Just another operating division who’s profits will never be repatriated due to the US Corporate tax system. Wonder why the jobs are gone? Here’s one reason.
I think this country has had it’s bellyful of GE. Time to go Alinsky on their azz.
Is anyone really surprised?
... oh
Anyone but GE is my new slogan.
We now need to ask where the XRay machine is made before we get into one. I wouldn’t use one of those things on a bet. So....we continue to refuse to buy Chinese products as well as GE products.
Could we at least get China to use their military to defend corporate interests overseas?
Why do you think companies are moving to China? Do you think our taxes, labor and environmental regulations, labor unions, and unfriendly business attitude might be playing a role? Or why are countries like China and Ireland attracting US corporations to set up their headquarters in those countries? Until we make this country a more attractive place to do business, we are going to see more and more jobs going elsewhere. It isn’t just about cheap labor.
The president’s jobs czar is doing a heck of a job — for China
Posted by Jon Talton
President Obama continued to exhibit a pleading weakness in his prime-time speech Monday night, so it’s no wonder Monday was the same day that his “jobs czar,” General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, chose to announce the company will be moving the headquarters of its health-care division to China. You want compromise, Mr. President? In your face, sir, with all due respect.
Immelt replaced Paul Volcker as a top economic adviser. The former Federal Reserve chief, who defeated runaway inflation in the early 1980s, was done in by his resistance to letting the big banks and Wall Street resume the business as usual that led to the financial meltdown. Mr. Obama wanted to project a more business-friendly face for his administration. The results of Immelt’s public service have been to barely dent the plight of 24 million Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. I suppose we should be grateful that GE’s domestic employment dropped only 1 percent last year even as net income hit $11.6 billion, topping Wall Street expectations.
Tell me about it. When you factor in the productivity advantages of the American worker the labor-cost disparity is usually slight-to-non-existent. It usually comes down to a taxes & cost of capital.
When some of my customers move automated assembly lines over to China the word came back that the "locals" couldn't maintain the equipment or get consistently good parts off them. So the Chinese did what they do best... they started hand-assembly. You can't tell me that the part quality didn't suffer.
GE sez: Give me your American money, and then moves offshore. Boy we got a great deal didn’t we? Stupid government!
Immelt has been known to do those types of treasonous things.
From a Ted Baxter piece he did a number of years.
http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/oreilly/2008/04/15/iran-general-electric-and-new-york-times
Way to go Zero...
Pr. Obama - ‘STOP GOP Offshoring of US Jobs’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt-pcsvdKGo
My mom is using bandages that cost $5 each made in Sweden. CVS charges $1.00@ for a regular J & J surgical dressing pad. Aquafore costs $7.50 for 3 oz and it is packaged in heavy plastic that prevents people from getting all of the ointment out of the tube. Some of the bandages cost $10 each. A toilet seat on a handicapped portable toilet cost $80
If it wasn't for Amazon, they couldn't afford to take care of her.
One of her antibiotics cost $650 for 10 days taking 2 tsp 2X/day.
Surely we have enough know how to start up honest companies. It can't cost that much to make this stuff.
He makes me sick! I cannot and will not watch the arrogant jerk who has no freaking clue.
F.O.O.
Aquaphor - 14 oz. jar - $16.99
http://www.drugstore.com/aquaphor-healing-ointment/qxp183554
Go through Ebates and get 8% back from Drugstore.com
And you can always find coupons if you Google for them...
$5 off $40 & Free Shipping Coupon -
This Drugstore.com coupon expires July 31, 2011.
$10 off $80 & Free Shipping Coupon
Good soundbite/campaigne poster material here.
Once the engineers are trained, this product will join all the other stuff in cargo holds coming from China.
GE = Obama’s best friend. I wonder if I could get some of those great GE grants and subsidies!
It doesn't make sensę to even bother trying in the USA... The government has now stacked the cards against us.
Name a city where a company has built a new manufacturing facility? Pretty hard to do. Factories are buildings that get torn down in urban America these days. New ones are not built and are not ever going to be built again.
Exorbitant property taxes, unions, regulation, environmental tyranny and urban ghettoization make US cities hostile environments for business investing.
Look at, say, Hartford, CT.
The "mill rate" is over 60 mills.
That means, for me to build a $10 million factory I would be liable for some approximately $500,000.00 in properry taxes alone per year. You have to stay up pretty late at night to figure out a way to hand over a half million bucks to some local tax collector...
Nobody in their right mind will invest in manufacturing in the average US urban ghetto.
“Or why are countries like China and Ireland attracting US corporations to set up their headquarters in those countries?”
Don’t know about the Irish, but the Chinese will steal the technology and kick GE to the curb once they do. GE is a fool.
I agree. Just don’t lecture me about J O B S when your jobs czar is moving jobs overseas because of your damn policies.
******
GE’s Immelt: Stop Complaining About Government
July 12, 2011
Immelt to jobs summit: Businesses need to do more – Jul. 11, 2011.
“The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway,” he told the group. “There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.”
Immelt is the chair of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. He said the group has made a number of recommendations for changes in government policies that should be able to help job creation, such as the executive order announced Monday asking independent agencies to rid their books of old and outdated regulations.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/07/11/news/economy/immelt_chamber_jobs_summit/index.htm?iid=HP_Highlight
Sure, lots of them! The problem is not just starting up, but growing. Regulatory shackles and confiscatory taxation make it hard to keep a business running on any size bigger than a handful of employees.
Surely we have enough know how to start up honest companies. It can't cost that much to make this stuff.
It's all really cheap - it's why you can get overseas produced versions for cheap. In the US, however, you'll need to probably get FDA certification (making medical products), and the liability insurance you'll have to carry - in case someone ingests your bandage, or puts the Aquafore on their cereal and gets sick - will be stratospheric.
Businesses typically do not move overseas because of labor or basic materials costs; by the time you factor in duties (yes, most things imported to the US have duties applied), shipping, and typically higher reject rates at the factory, the cost will be equal or greater.
However, that company will get to keep significantly more mof what it makes (the US has the highest corporate tax rate in the world, and a full 10% above the OECD average), much lower regulatory burden (no need to provide segregated bathrooms for transgender folks, ADA-compliant magazine holders, etc), and common-sense legal protections (when that client swallows the bandage the court will probably laugh them out of the room, rather than take the complaint seriously).
The overall cost of doing business outside the COGS is much lower. And that is 100% in control of the US Federal Government, and is something out Federal Government continues to ignore. So businesses keep moving.
Better to earn a few bucks overseas, than nothing at home, eh?
Sanctimonious hypocrite!
The lapdog media will give him a pass... After all, it’s “Team Obama” in action and the One must not be criticized.
If it’s a product for sale on the open market, you can bet that it’s already been acquired, torn apart, and reverse engineered not just by the Chinese, but in India, Russia, South Korea, Japan, and most of GE’s competitors.
Protecting IP of sold hardware/physical products is essentially impossible - you make the actual IP available for purchase by your competitors. And unless you have the IP protected in their country, don’t expect protection there.
I hold a few patents in the US, and some that were filed and granted in the US, Germany, and China. The only ones I’ve been able to successfully defend in Germany and China were those that were filed there. Unsurprisingly, most nations - including the US - ignore IP protection for other countries.
The US doesn’t care that you, a Taiwanese company, have a Taiwan patent on your product; we only care if you have a US patent as well. Well, most of the rest of the world does the same - they only care if you have a patent in their country, not in yours.
I'm in business to make money. Period.
This is not good.
I've been a lurker here at FR long enough to know that if you take that attitude, and also include a willingness to make money overseas, you'll be branded a traitor.
IMHO, paying your own way - even if earning it overseas - is vastly superior to taking Government handouts. And if we had sane regulations and taxation (I'd like to see the corporate income tax rate set to zero, personally - imagine the flood of repatriated capital and new businesses to US shores!) we'd see a lot more economic activity here.
Increasingly, the dwindling number of US businesses are surviving in spite of, not because of, the Government.
Precisely! GE doesn't like paying 39.6% of its gross income back to the Federal Government. I can't say I don't blame them...
Neither do the rest of us but someone has to pay taxes to keep Uncle Sugar happy. /s
It’s just ironic that Immelt is lecturing everyone else while GE pays NO damn taxes.
A low corporate tax rate alone would not be enough.
Local property taxes are exorbitant, regulation, unions and now environmental hurdles continually raise the height of barriers to business in the USA.
Then you have social regulation regarding protected ethnicities, genders and sexual preferences and a hostile legal environment with lawsuit-happy lawyers populating every icy sidewalk...
There is a lot wrong from a business perspective.
I have been to China. The corporations have moved top of the line production equipment to China and the workforce is just as capable and educated as Americans. It is very difficult to compete with that.
As a smart guy whose name I’ve forgotten said on CNBC last year:
China has central planning by scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and the US has central planning by lawyers.
By definition we lose.
Note that is only a handful of managers that will be sited in China. But they will always be on the road, going around the world to drum up business, except for the five months and twenty five days a year that they are with their US based family, ensuring that they are not residents of the US.
So, GE can take this fast growing, profitable business headquarters out of the US, thus future worldwide profits are then subject to intercompany transfer prices, regardless of where the products are actually produced, and the transfer pricing mechanism will be skewed to recording profit in the lowest tax rated country.
It’s no wonder that GE pays no US income taxes, they dodge the tax by US and international tax laws. (Back when I was with ITT, they did the same, and didn’t need to pay US taxes.
What I knew as GE Medical Systems when I lived in WI back in the 80s was a huge manufacturing facility. Its in Waukesha which I believe is a conservative area. Offshoring righty jobs is on the regime’s agenda. WI Freepers: Whats up with this move?
ANY medical related sale includes a HUGE premium to insure against the John Edwards of the US.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.