"Made in America" Soon Won't Mean Made in America

Trey Smith

Don't like the trade deficit, low GDP and the public outrage over the offshore outsourcing? Change the accounting method to make it go away! Such is the agenda of government statisticians it appears. How they are going to incorporate statistical lies into national accounts is shocking. Production location no longer matters, the thing that will count is ownership of the final product.

We have a new definition, Factoryless manufacturing. Did you know we can have U.S. manufacturing without actually making any goods in the United States? That's the plan to count corporations and their products who are located in the U.S. but offshore outsource their manufacturing abroad as part of the U.S. manufacturing base. Get that?

Factoryless” manufacturers, as defined by the U.S. OMB, perform underlying entrepreneurial components of arranging the factors of production but outsource all of the actual transformation activities to other specialized units.

Right now, iPhones are counted as imports and rightly so. Apple has offshore outsourced manufacturing and final assembly to China. Most parts are not manufactured in the United States and components come from China, Japan, South Korea and Germany. Very obviously an iPhone is no more American than that cheap plastic good marked Made in China.

Yet if the government statistical agencies have their way, that iPhone will be an American manufactured good, despite the fact that 1 million Chinese made the thing while Apple does not provide Americans jobs of scale and maintains their strong profit margins.

The target date for this statistical fraud is 2017. There is a Factoryless Production Group, involving all of the statistical agencies, working out the incorporation to count offshore outsourcing as U.S. manufacturing.
~ from America's Outsourcers to be Reclassified as Manufacturers by Robert Oak ~

Sigh.

I get tired of reporting how the Obama administration (and the Bush administration before it) is undertaking these strong efforts to "cook the books", but it seems like a new one is revealed every month or so. It continues to remind me of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four! Official language keeps getting reinvented to hide vital information.

If this change is implemented -- I don't see why it wouldn't be -- then the "Made in America" label won't mean a damn thing! If it no longer has a substantive meaning, then it will encourage those companies who still manufacture products in America to reconsider that strategy.

Why pay American workers x, when you can pay foreign wage-slaves y?

Why put up with certain environmental regulations here, when you can bribe some impoverished nation to look the other way?

Why worry about complying with health and occupational safety rules, when you can ship the jobs to a place where those same rules are more lax or nonexistent?

What will the incentive be to make anything in America anymore?