As someone who has spent the last few months driving across Northern Ohio, one thing is absolutely clear: Americans need jobs and they need them now. My district is filled with abandoned factories and boarded up storefronts, businesses that once kept food on the table for thousands of Ohioans. In fact, according to the most recent Census, Ohio has lost over 250,000 people over the past ten years, and most of them left from the 9th District. As I often say on the campaign trail, these folks aren’t leaving to drink Coronas on the beach; they are leaving because Marcy Kaptur and Dennis Kucinich’s job killing agenda has driven businesses out of our state!

Something must be done, and that is why I am happy to announce the Joe the Plumber “Jobs for Ohio” Tour! The Tour will feature former Presidential candidate Herman Cain, a man who has spent his life creating jobs in the private sector and whose ambitious 9-9-9 tax plan would do wonders for encouraging businesses to come back to the United States. I will also be speaking about my campaign to bring working class conservative values to Washington DC by becoming the Congressman who represents the interests of all Americans, instead of just the politically-connected elites.

I am also calling upon all the current Republican Presidential candidates to step up and join us on this tour.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the iPhone’s manufacturing process, why it can only be done in China, and the reasons technology manufacturing will never return to America.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work
Apple’s results hinge on the iPhone question
Making It in America

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American Exceptionalism has routinely been underestimated by America’s adversaries. We have argued for the last year that powerful trends are reshaping U.S. that will lead to result a rebirth of American manufacturing, coupled with positive business trends, and just as powerful political trends are shrinking the size of government and its capacity to intervene in the economy. The combination of these trends will create a sustained upward spike in the American economy.

Last week the Financial Times newspaper published an editorial: “America Must Manage Its Decline”. The jest of the FT article was that United States must develop an effect foreign policy, similar to Great Britain’s in 1945, to manage her economic and political decline:

“If America were able openly to acknowledge that its global power is in decline, it would be much easier to have a rational debate about what to do about it. Denial is not a strategy.”

President Obama, the American press, the rabid right wing, and even a Harvard professor were all excoriated by the FT for their pathetic reliance on such homilies as: “Decline is not a condition. Decline is a choice.” From the high floor in the FT’s office tower, the author cynically snarled down at America’s inability to take “determined action” to increase higher education funding and “self-indulgent episodes such as the summer’s near-debt default” as prime evidence of America’s “declinism” and the inevitable rise to economic dominance by China.

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If you haven’t already, take a gander at a column authored by former Treasury Secretary and Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers in yesterday’s Washington Post.

In it, Summers contends that to truly turn around the nation’s housing market – a key economic indicator and driver – one must, in effect, double down on the sector, spending more in both public and private dollars.

“The central irony of a financial crisis is that while it is caused by too much confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending,” argues Summers, “it can be resolved only with more confidence, borrowing and lending, and spending. This is true, above all, of housing policies.”

That’s just dandy. True to the dogma of his former boss, Summers apparently believes we haven’t done enough damage to the housing market through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and Uncle Sam needs to be more involved in driving home construction and sales.

That is best carried out through financing, he posits. “[C]redit standards for those seeking to buy homes are too high and too rigorous,” Summers argues. Uhh, can someone quickly get him a history book and turn to the chapters from a few years ago where the housing market began to collapse? The reason wasn’t tightened credit but the exact opposite. Our lending institutions sponsored by the feds such as Freddie and Fannie were practically giving loans to anyone who asked for them – senseless amounts of money with little-to-no credit backing to vouch for the security of the loans. (more…)

From BusinessInsider:

Steve Jobs told President Obama he probably would not be re-elected, Walter Isaacson wrote in Jobs’ soon-to-be-released biography.

That’s because regulations and unions in the United States were crippling its ability to remain competitive with emerging powerhouses like China.

The biography was picked up by the Huffington Post, which published excerpts earlier today.

Jobs met with Obama in fall 2010 and said it was too difficult to build a factory in the U.S., which led the company to build manufacturing plants in countries like China.

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There is a word missing from the “solutions” offered by both Democrats and Republicans to the searing economic crisis visited upon America by a combination of craven financial speculators, complacent regulators, feckless politicians and not a little bit of greed amongst many borrowers.

That word is “sell.”

It is only in the selling of surplus manufactures – as Adam Smith taught us – that new income enters the economic system, with the corollary effect of demonstrating, maintaining and advancing the  institutional and operations frameworks for national competitiveness.

So we must ask ourselves, what is America selling to the world? (more…)

The stronger-than-expected ISM manufacturing-index reading for September might normally suggest that the economy, at least for now, has dodged a recession bullet. After zero jobs and zero real consumer spending in August, which put the stalled economy on the front end of recession, the ISM number is the first major September reading.

But economist Michael Darda says hold the applause: Inside the ISM, new orders and order backlogs either flat-lined or declined and remain below 50 — the DMZ recession marker on the index.

Darda believes weak data in the U.S., plus the ongoing European crisis, plus the China slowdown, plus widened corporate credit spreads and stressful financial conditions, all point to a declining economy and additional stock market drops.

Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) is also on the bear side. He has a falling weekly leading index that signals recession is inevitable. “It’s either just begun, or it’s right in front of us,” he told CNN Money.

Tough stuff.

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From BusinessInsider:

From its inception, Solyndra’s business model was flawed. It’s unique cylindrical, silicon solar cells were innovative, but only made sense when solar panel prices were high. By the time the Energy Department approved Solyndra’s loan — the first granted by the department’s loan guarantee program —Chinese and Canadian manufacturers with low-cost structures had priced Solyndra out of the market.

In March 2009, Solyndra’s loan application, to build an advanced manufacturing facility in California, was fast-tracked through the DOE, despite the fact that the department had not completed its review of the company’s financial viability.

Solyndra was not the only company that was fast-tracked. A 2010 government audit of the DOE program found that the department lacked the ability to adequately evaluate applications to the federal loan program, and often approved loans before completing a full review.

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From the Associated Press:

Consumers paid more for a range of goods and services last month, and unemployment benefit applications jumped last week to the highest level in three months. The latest data offered a picture of an economy facing inflationary pressures and a depressed job market.

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.4 percent in August, the Labor Department said Thursday. That followed a 0.5 percent increase in July. Excluding volatile food and energy costs, core prices increased 0.2 percent.

Prices for food, energy apartment rents, and clothing all increased.

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The White House has a new report out touting the “resurgence” of the automotive industry, primarily aimed at depicting President Obama’s auto bailout as an unqualified success.

One thing that springs out of the report are claims it makes as to job creation within the industry as compared to job losses projected by the White House and sustained prior to the bailout.  The report states that:

Since GM and Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy, the auto industry has created 115,000 jobs, its strongest period of job growth since the late 1990s.

And:

It was the interdependence between the auto companies and suppliers, dealers and communities that led some experts at the time to estimate that were GM and Chrysler allowed to liquidate, at least 1 million jobs could have been lost.

And:

In the year before President Obama took office, the industry shed over 400,000 jobs.

This is interesting, some observers say, in view of action the Obama administration is currently contemplating that would impact the auto industry, potentially very adversely: Vastly increasing Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for model years 2017-2025.

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As pre-November primaries come to an end, inquiring political minds will be asking Americans, “What is the singularly most important issue that will drive you to vote this year?”

Almost certainly, the answer will be “jobs.”

Republican proposals to reduce taxes, regulation and government to stimulate growth are right on the money.  But they still won’t overcome one of the GOP’s most serious problems – its post-Reagan divorce from “the working man.”

In April, a bi-partisan poll was released by the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) measuring support by GOP and Tea Party voters for American manufacturing as an agent of job growth.  The results will come as a surprise to no one – except, perhaps, elected Republicans.

Millions of Americans associated with manufacturing have long felt ignored by the Republican Party for many reasons — primarily Democrats’ strong union ties.  But that paradigm could shift in 2010 based on current political trends.

Of the 37 Governors’ mansions currently in play, nineteen are held by Democrats and 18 by Republicans.  Four states – Massachusetts, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan – are big losers in the manufacturing employment race to the bottom and are expected to be swing or trending states in the 2012 Presidential contest.

Since 2000, Michigan lost 434,000 manufacturing jobs; Ohio, 392,000; and 291,000 in Pennsylvania.  Massachusetts, America’s original factory state, shed 150,000.

In these key states the current governor is a Democrat, yet the nation’s top political prognosticators are listing them as “toss up” or “leaning Republican.” Republicans could pick up four to seven governorships overall.

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Last week’s national unemployment numbers demonstrated that the economic recovery President Obama promised us is still a ways away.  In Pennsylvania the unemployment rate increased last month hovering just above 9%.

Given these numbers, the last thing Washington politicians should be doing is supporting legislation that would cost thousands more jobs. But that is exactly what my very liberal opponent, Congressman Joe Sestak, is doing.

Not only did Congressman Sestak sponsor and vote for a cap-and-trade energy tax, he argued that the tax did not go far enough!

A cap-and-trade energy tax would impose an onerous indirect tax on the production and consumption of carbon-based energy. It would cap the amount of carbon dioxide businesses could emit, impose a penalty when the cap is exceeded, and would require that carbon emissions be cut by 20 percent of 2005 levels by 2020.

Independent studies have found that this would cost the country millions of jobs, but in an industrial state like Pennsylvania, the cap-and-trade tax would be even more harmful than elsewhere. Our state’s coal, natural gas and manufacturing industries would be especially hard hit.

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