As the Obama campaign hammers Romney for Bain Capital’s record of outsourcing, the president’s own record of pushing jobs overseas is under attack from the left.
According to the Washington Post, liberals are accusing Obama of failing to follow through on his 2008 campaign promises to change the tax rules to force companies to pay taxes on income generated abroad. The rewrite of the tax code has yet to happen:
While White House officials say they have been waiting on Congress to act, Obama’s critics, primarily on the political left, say he has repeatedly failed in other ways to protect American jobs from being moved overseas. They point to a range of actions they say he should have taken: confronting China, reining in unfettered trade and reworking a U.S. visa program that critics say ends up sending high-tech jobs abroad. …
American jobs have been shifting to low-wage countries for years, and the trend has continued during Obama’s presidency. From 2008 to 2010, U.S. trade with China alone cost about 450,000 American jobs because of the growth of Chinese exports, said Robert E. Scott, a pro-labor advocate at the liberal Economic Policy Institute. That figure was less than in previous years, but the decrease was probably tied to the U.S. economic slowdown, which crimped demand for imports.
"I think he has walked away from the campaign commitments," said Scott, the institute’s director of trade and manufacturing policy research. "He has done far too little to improve U.S. trade."