4um: Mark Shields: 'The Most Urgent Priority America Has Is To Find Jobs For Young Egyptians'

By Noel Sheppard | April 23, 2011 | 10:10

Out of the mouths of babes...

On Friday's "Inside Washington," during a discussion about American foreign policy in the Middle East and Africa, PBS's Mark Shields actually said, "The most urgent priority that we have is to find jobs somehow, not simply for Americans, which is an urgent priority, but for young Egyptians" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The administration's policy on Syria is incomprehensible. Sometimes you have to choose between a strategic ally, like say Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, and human rights, you know, and you decide, ok, I’ll give up on rights because I have to protect the strategic ally. But Syria is an enemy, an ally of Iran. It funneled fighters into Iraq who killed Americans. Here is a regime teetering at the edge. There is a genuine revolution, and we are doing and saying almost nothing. It is a scandal.

GORDON PETERSON, HOST: Hasn't the state department been pushing for engagement with the Syrian government so that they can weaken its allegiance to Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran?

KRAUTHAMMER: And for the same reason that Obama spoke so weakly about the revolution in Iran in 2009, because he had a fantasy of negotiating with the Mullahs over the nukes, which was of course a fantasy, and thus he did nothing. Here they’ve had this (?) of negotiating Assad out of his alliance with Iran and Hezbollah, which Americans have dreamed about for 30 years. It is a fantasy. And in the name of that he sent an ambassador into Syria. Still there. He has to be withdrawn tomorrow as at least the beginning of a statement of opposition to the regime.

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: Charles didn't note that part of Mrs. Clinton’s statement, which I think was at the opening of the show, actually did denounce what was going on in Syria. But, you know, Secretaries of State always do these sort of little formal dances that don’t mean a lot. What I think probably the any administration would realize that there is a limit to what we can do about Syria. You don’t want to get so far out there that you are involved in something that you can’t do something about.

PETERSON: Well, we're involved in Libya, we’re sending drones in now.

TOTENBERG: There, we have some capacity. Some of us on this panel didn’t think it was a great idea to get involved there either, but, but at least we have some capacity. In Syria we don’t have much of a capacity…

KRAUTHAMMER: Why’s our ambassador still in Damascus?

PETERSON: Let me hear from Mark.

MARK SHIELDS, PBS: I am envious. I wish I was as sure of anything as Charles is of everything. And I would say that the most important…

KRAUTHAMMER: Well that is why I sleep so well and I look so young.

SHIELDS: Obviously is. The most urgent priority that we have is to find jobs somehow, not simply for Americans, which is an urgent priority, but for young Egyptians. That is going to determine whether, in fact, this revolution is going to take root and take a positive development.

We have an 8.8 percent unemployment rate - far higher if you count folks that have dropped out of the labor force due to their discouragement as well as those working part-time that wish they could find more hours. We have now set a new post-Depression record for the number of months this rate has been eight percent or higher.

The current administration has shown itself completely inept when it comes to job creation within our own shores, and this liberal media member thinks it's an urgent priority for us to find jobs for young people thousands of miles away in a foreign land.

Would you say Mr. Shields is a bit unplugged from reality?

Whitehouse says companies get a tax break for moving jobs overseas

It's bad enough when companies take U.S. jobs and move them overseas to take advantage of lower labor costs. But does the U.S. tax code actually offer an incentive for firms to engage in such "offshoring?"

That was the assertion of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse earlier this fall when he went on the floor of the Senate to argue for a bill, designated S-3816 and known as the "Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act."

The proposal, he said, "would close some really perverse loopholes in the tax code that, right now, reward American companies for moving American jobs overseas. The law, right now, permits companies that close down American factories and offices and move those jobs overseas to take a tax deduction for the costs associated with moving the jobs to China or India or wherever."

There's nothing controversial about allowing companies to deduct their expenses for doing business, but does the tax system actually help companies cover the cost of moving local jobs to another country?

Absolutely, said Thea Lee, deputy chief of staff of the AFL-CIO, a 12-million member labor organization that opposes offshoring. "You can take a business deduction for the costs associated with moving the job. So if you close down your factory in Providence, pack everything up and have to train the workers and ship the machinery overseas, all the costs associated with that are tax deductions," she said.

As a result, companies get back roughly a third of their expense at the expense of U.S. taxpayers, she said.

"There have been a lot of attempts over the years to get rid of this," but corporation lobbyists have argued that the loophole is needed because it creates more jobs, said Lee. "You can believe that or not. I don't give it a lot of credence."

Robert E. Scott, senior international economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank that deals with issues of concern to low- and middle-income workers, confirmed that relocation expenses are deductible and that existing tax law makes no distinction between whether a company moves part of its operations to another state or to another country.

"Businesses that have expenses of any kind are allowed to deduct them against income, and that would include any kind of shutdown expenses having to do with a plant," he said. "They could also play games, potentially, with writing down any undepreciated value, so if they decide to scrap equipment they're shipping to China they could write down the depreciated value and take that off against their taxes as well. Both are options available to companies, and I suspect they are widely used."

On the same day Whitehouse made his statement, Scott A. Hodge, president of The Tax Foundation, a business-backed group that studies tax policy, released a statement saying the problem that served as the premise of the legislation isn't as big as people imagine.

He cited a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from the second quarter of 2010 showing 338,064 mass layoffs. When seasonal layoffs are subtracted, only 6 percent of the remaining workers -- 10,206 people -- lost their jobs during that quarter due to any movement of work. When the destination of the relocation was known (most of the time it wasn't) about 29 percent of the movement was to places outside the U.S. We checked more-recent numbers from the third quarter of this year; they showed a similar pattern.)

"The bottom line is that offshoring accounts for a small percentage of overall job losses . . . The offshoring of jobs may make for good headlines and political points, but it is not supported by the data," Hodge concluded.

In this case, the bill, which would also have given companies two years of payroll tax relief for jobs they brought back to the U.S. from overseas, was opposed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in part because it contained another provision limiting the ability of companies to defer paying U.S. taxes on money earned overseas. The chamber argued that it would limit the ability to compete overseas.

S-3816 was essentially voted down Sept. 28 after it garnered only 53 of the 60 votes required to close off debate. Among 57 Democrats, 52 supported it (one didn't vote), 40 of 41 Republicans opposed it (one didn't vote) and the two independents were split.

So the law Whitehouse decries is still the law. There is little debate that the current system allows companies to get a tax break for their expenses when they send jobs outside the U.S.

The young educated Egyptians speak English. They can come to America and replace every Jew and every Zionist in the US media. That way no real white people will lose any more jobs.