Free Republic

Don’t be surprised to lose if you don’t make an effort at being competitive.And if you go out of your way to make yourself less competitive, expect to lose.If that sounds like simple common sense, that’s because it is.But it’s also exactly what the US has been doing for years—enacting tax policies that sabotage its global economic competitiveness.It’s like trying to get in shape for a marathon by going on an all-McDonald’s diet. (Speaking of McDonalds, check out this funny video spoof of what their commercials should really look like.)Here are two major reasons why the US is lagging in...

Bill Gates doesn’t slum it when it comes to his vacations. The world's richest man has been photographed enjoying quality family time aboard an extravagant $330 million yacht. The Microsoft founder has been pictured on “The Serene,” a stunning 450-foot boat he’s renting from Stolichnaya vodka magnate Yuri Scheffler for a cool $5 million per week. Moored off the coast of Sardinia, it reportedly has 12 state rooms, a seawater swimming pool, a cinema, a nightclub, a climbing wall, a gym and two hot tubs.

Walgreens leaving Illinois for Switzerland? SPRINGFIELD – I picked up my vacation photos at Walgreens the other day.  And I didn’t hear any French, German or Italian spoken.How surprising.I’ve read that the Deerfield, Ill.,-based drugstore chain is considering becoming a Swiss corporation. I’ll admit the thought of a company that is essentially an American icon becoming a foreign corporation gives me pause.  After all, Walgreens is one of Illinois’ premier companies. It was founded here in 1901 and is headquartered in Deerfield, Ill. And now they are talking about moving their headquarters to Switzerland.But what exactly does it mean when...

According to the wire service, Monsanto mulled a takeover of its $34 billion seed and herbicide rival, in part, to move its legal headquarters to Switzerland. It’s a move known as corporate inversion and it has the power to shield money held overseas from Uncle Sam’s tax collectors.

It’s that time of year again — graduation season. While commencement ceremonies should be a time of celebration for college graduates, it has rather become a moment of panic. Young America's Foundation latest polling shows that 51 percent of graduating college seniors feel “nervous” about their future after graduation. Many of the respondents blamed their anxiety about the future on the bad economy. Of the graduating seniors that were polled, 39 percent said they are not at all optimistic about finding a job in the first few months after graduation. The Obama administration and liberals in Washington are consistently letting...

Here's a typical college scenario: Your daughter's dream job is to be an elementary school teacher and reading specialist. Yet she'll need to dive deep into debt to pursue her undergraduate degree, and borrow more if continuing to grad school. She's worried -- rightfully -- about her financial future, and she's looking for answers. How much debt might she be saddled with? How much will her college degree translate into salary once she lands a job? And what budget-squeezing sacrifices might be necessary to repay the swath of loans? Those types of questions are on the minds of countless college...

This week, a report from the Congressional Budget Office acknowledged that ObamaCare would reduce full-time employment by 2.5 million over the next ten years. And that is on top of news that 92 million Americans who could be working are not. What a devastating assessment for the unemployed or underemployed, particular millenials seeking to transition from internships and part-time jobs to career-building full-time jobs. Yet the predictable spin from the White House and major media outlets is that this is good news, liberating workers from the chains of employment. To quote President Obama, from the 2008 campaign, "You can put...

Remember when John McAfee warned us in November that anybody who signed up to the Obamacare site might have their bank account cleaned-out by hackers? The eccentric genius and former fugitive called the government website 'a hacker's wet dream', adding that there were 'NO safeguards' that would stop someone from starting a fake Obamacare website 'for a couple hundred dollars' that could 'empty your bank account' in hours.  McAfee added unambiguously that 'It's going to happen, and it's going to happen soon... nothing in the Obamacare system safeguards against this.'  And I thought he was just trying to sell...

The government said GDP rose 3.2% in the last three months of 2013 -- one of the fastest rates since the end of the recession, though slower than the third quarter's 4.1%. Still, that sounds good, until you remember this: Employers only added 74,000 jobs in December -- one of the worst months in nearly three years. Stronger economic growth is supposed to equal more jobs. So what gives? It does appear that the normal relationship between jobs and GDP has broken down. In the first half of 2013, for instance, GDP growth was at 1.9% and employers added an...

"Leavin’ on a jet plane: Obama supporters vow exodus from US if Romney wins" Oof. Another election, another litany of threats from American liberals vowing to leave the country if a Republican is elected president:

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...

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,...

Could somebody please get Barack Obama to shut up about “outsourcing” until some undergraduate aide has explained to him what the word means? As it stands, the president is showing himself an ignorant rube on the subject, and that is to nobody’s advantage. The Obama campaign, as you probably know, has been running ads denouncing Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital, in which Romney made various business deals that had the effect of making a whole lot of money for Bain’s customers while also allowing a lot of dirty foreigners to eat, and God knows the world would be better...

Rajesh Rao is among a handful of Indian entrepreneurs who may prevent the country's software industry from getting "Bangalored". The 41-year-old self-confessed geek runs Dhruva, a firm that sells content and services to global online game companies from a bungalow in a crowded suburb of a city that has come to embody outsourcing and the transfer of jobs from the West. But plain vanilla outsourcing - help desks and back office operations - is finding cheaper locations abroad. India's software industry has discovered it needs to move up the value chain or enter niche areas like gaming to continue growing....

Work Forces Shrink at Home, Sharpening Debate on Economic Impact of Globalization U.S. multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers, have been hiring abroad while cutting back at home, sharpening the debate over globalization's effect on the U.S. economy. The companies cut their work forces in the U.S. by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million, new data from the U.S. Commerce Department show. That's a big switch from the 1990s, when they added jobs everywhere: 4.4 million in the U.S. and 2.7 million abroad. In all, U.S....

No question about it -- we are in deep trouble. Unemployment, manufacturing being killed here and jobs moving overseas, unrestrained spending and the resultant deficits being given cover by more and more printing press “money” and the inflation – or worse – that almost always follows, etc., etc. And when the new – ostensibly conservative -- members of Congress take their seats in January, we will only see the beginning of the long and painful process of retracing our steps back to Constitutional and fiscal sanity. It points to the fact that much of our trouble stems from a failure...

American industry is at the end of a four-decade tail spin. We've reached the point where people talk about a recovery that doesn't bring back factory jobs, or at least gives up some industries for lost. In this light, it's surprising to read a rosy outlook from the NBER about the impact of immigrant labor and offshoring. Both practices have a cost-saving effect, the study finds, that "may leave unaffected, or even increase, total native employment of less skilled workers." Maybe these 11 industries are on the verge of a renaissance, but we think not.

BANGALORE: Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 163,700 employees as on June 30. But guess who's number 2? The honour goes to -- surprise, surprise -- IBM. That's right. Not to any Tata or Ambani company, or to Infosys or Wipro. The fact that IBM has over 100,000 people on its rolls in this country is one of India Inc's best-kept secrets. No one in US-headquartered IBM will admit that it employs such a large number of people in India -- for fear of a backlash at home. There's been rising anger...

CRAMER: OBAMA FORCING US INVESTORS OVERSEASCNBC commentator Jim Cramer says President Obama is picking a fight with the stock market and that investors should turn overseas as a result. “We have a president who is kind of turning on the stock market in a populist way,” Cramer said on the air. “If you’re a populist, you think that the stock market is for rich people. I hear that kind of thing in his voice, and it makes me say, ‘Maybe I should now focus on foreign stocks.'” Cramer recommends that investors lift foreign stock holdings to 25 percent of their...

While not all of those jobs will be lost overseas, those workers will face wage pressures. -- Hewlett-Packard has asked many of its EDS employees to take 50% pay cuts. Even the most pro-offshoring report, written by McKinsey Global Institute's Diana Farrell, which asserted that the U.S. will be better off with offshoring, concedes that American workers will experience major losses in wages and jobs. Offshoring is a major structural shift in the way the economy works. Alan Blinder has called it a shift equivalent to the industrial revolution. Ponder that! What needs to change so that companies reject outsourcing...