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Scott Paul: The Onshoring Trend is Phony
Howard Richman, 8/25/2010

Writing in the Huffington Post on August 20 (The Onshoring Trend is Phony), Scott Paul pointed out:

On Friday August 6th, no less an authority than the president himself heralded a USA Today front page story headlined: "Some manufacturing heads back to USA." I watched CNBC that morning -- the July unemployment figures were just out -- and its anchors also trumpeted the news. So did the House Democratic leadership, which viewed the headline as a positive development and vindication of its recent focus on manufacturing. I don't blame any of these folks for trying to squeeze the good news out of an otherwise horrible day of economic news, but it turns out that exactly the opposite is happening,

Turns out they were all misinformed. Actual hard data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia today shows that onshoring, in fact, has declined over the past two years. Only 4.5 percent of manufacturers surveyed indicated that they had brought work back to the U.S. since the beginning of the year, compared to 6.2 percent in a survey two years ago. On the other hand, offshoring continues at a higher, though slightly diminished, pace: 9.7 percent of companies indicated that they had offshored work, compared to 11.1 percent two years ago.

It is becoming more and more obvious that our leaders including the Obama administration, congress and the Main Stream Media live in a fantasy world in which they do nothing and the mercantilist countries spontaneously stop stealing our jobs and industries. Our Scaled Tariff would end mercantilism and jumpstart our economy.

Comment by ron smith, 8/26/2010: Reshoring, onshoring, backshoring has fluctuated over the last decade. If you said that it has increased substantially over the last one vs the previous one even the Fed would agree. If you imply as USA Today did that it is a solid trend based on just the last few year's input then you would be misleading the reader... just as Paul is doing. The future is not bright for continued offshoring as more biliousness will be off-offing from China/India to Vietnam/Pakistan or some such. It would be a mistake to assume the offshoring trend is not slowing down and will eventually end. Same mistake as assuming onshoring will.