Intel Chief: “Jobs Will Not Be Created Here”

It would be difficult to capture all of the good reporting from CNET without violating the terms of fair use in copyright law, but we’ll try. They have the thoughts of Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, at the Aspen Institute and his thoughts on government making it too difficult and too expensive to hire people … namely that unless government policies are altered, he predicted, “the next big thing will not be invented here. Jobs will not be created here.”

The article covers tax policy, Keynesian economics, and more, but just consider this example:

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.”)

“If our tax rate approached that of the rest of the world, corporations would have an incentive to invest here,” Otellini said. But instead, it’s the second highest in the industrialized world, making the United States a less attractive place to invest–and create jobs–than places in Europe and Asia that are “clamoring” for Intel’s business.