Who Cares About Offshoring?

Imagine Mitt Romney had replaced lots of American workers with robots. Surely, no one would be running attack ads about that. "Robots, for some reason, are good Americans," quips Richard Cohen of the Washington Post. But the Obama campaign is running ads accusing Romney of sending jobs overseas—and let's be clear, "if Romney did not approve offshoring jobs … he certainly would have." Even if he wasn't running Bain, he didn't complain. "He merely deposited the checks."

In a way, Romney deserves this, for claiming his business experience qualifies him to be president. "Romney doesn’t have any idea how to create jobs," Cohen argues. "Neither does Barack Obama." Our education system is churning out expensive-yet-unskilled workers, and if companies can get foreigners—or robots—to do the work better and for less, they will. "This is a rule. What is not a rule is that the debate about this has to be conducted on a schoolyard level about when, exactly, Romney was running Bain." Read Cohen's full column here. (More Richard Cohen stories.)