Take factories. "I can tell you definitively that it costs $1 billion more per factory for me to build, equip, and operate a semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States," Otellini said.
The rub: Ninety percent of that additional cost of a $4 billion factory is not labor but the cost to comply with taxes and regulations that other nations don't impose. (Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers elaborated on this in an interview with CNET, saying the problem is not higher U.S. wages but antibusiness laws: "The killer factor in California for a manufacturer to create, say, a thousand blue-collar jobs is a hostile government that doesn't want you there and demonstrates it in thousands of ways.")
In other words those 1000s of high paying semiconductor jobs will instead go to Indians or Chinese and not to Americans. The bad part too is that these jobs are exactly the type that need to be created to raise our GDP for years to come. I think Otellini is finally saying publicly that Obama might be damaging businesses more then people realize. I could see the writing on the wall when he lumped venture capitalists in with hedge fund managers. They couldn't be more different in everything they do.The bad part is that I would be willing to bet that Otellini has just been put on some enemies list in the White House. Instead of listening to his warnings they are hatching plans to get all of their machines with AMD processors or some other such nonsense. The government picks the winners and losers in the Obamaconomy and not marketplace or the company with the best product.
In any case I hope Otellini throws Intel's weight behind some pro-market GOP candidates to better block to job destruction coming out of the White House.
No comments:
Post a Comment