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Growing trade gap with China heavy cost to United States

By Staff | Mar 4, 2015

To the editor:

What ever happened to “Made in the USA” products? Ever since the world market global economy where cheap foreign labor, low cost off shore manufacturing practices made it more difficult for cost conscious consumers to routinely purchase American made products. The growing trade gap with China has cost America three million jobs since 2001, including about 115,000 in Florida.

Each one billion in exports to China from U.S. supports some American jobs according to the Economic Policy Institute. However each $1 billion in imports from China displaces the American worker who would have been employed making these products in the United States.

Southwest Florida suffered about 2,600 jobs disappeared from 2001 to 2013.

On another matter, the number of the day is “76.” That is the number of U.S. companies that have shifted their tax domiciles out of the United States to other countries since 1983 to avoid U.S. corporate taxes.

Walgreens, the U.S.’s largest drug store chain, with more than 8,500 stores, soon will decide whether to take advantage of a loop hole in the U.S. tax law that would allow them to save billions of dollars by moving their headquarters to Europe. Making the move could save the company as much as $4 billion in corporate taxes over the next five years.

Just recently, President Obama called inversion an unpatriotic tax loophole and pressed Congress to pass legislation to stem the flow of corporations renouncing their U.S. citizenship.

Inversion could cost the U.S. Treasury nearly $19.5 billion over the next decade.

The question now is will more large companies move to Europe to take advantage of the loophole as well. Time will tell.

Jane Dickinson

Lehigh Acres