Though some may disagree with me, I don't think this is an issue of taxes or regulation. It's not even a partisan or political issue. This is merely the market at work.
The American worker isn't the most productive in the world. From a business perspective the American worker is a commodity. Their services are a resource which can be purchased and utilized, but it's a resource that can be purchased anywhere. The only increased value an American worker has is that goods made in America have fewer shipping requirements IF America is your target market. If you plan to sell globally (which is becoming more and more common) then even that advantage goes out of the window.
Just look at our own purchasing decisions? How many of you will buy a gun at $750 from one shop when another one down the street has the same thing for $500? Customer loyalty MIGHT get you to pay the difference (only for a precious few people), but companies don't have that. A corporate board, through it's actions as a group, removes most semblance of loyalty. Not only that, but once an IPO is made then they actually have a LEGAL OBLIGATION to the shareholders to maximize profit. That means that if you can legitimately save a buck in some area, then you legally have to.
Now, taxes or not, Americans demand higher wages than most of the world. The Democrats say to regulate the businesses to force them to behave ethically. That won't work. The Republicans either call for a complete hands off approach, or heavy import tarrifs, which ALSO won't work. The simple truth is that for a long time Americans rode a wave after WW2. We developed a HUGE manufacturing sector during the war that kept churning afterwards while most of the rest of the world was either planting rice or rebuilding cities that had been reduced to rubble. With that wealth flowed easily into the US economy as we sold goods to the entire world. Then came the period during the 80's and 90's. Those other countries had been rebuilt, and/or had produced an industrial complex capable of manufacturing goods. We still had a lopsided distribution of the world's wealth though. So with those countries recruiting a labor force essentially from the fields, they were able to produce tons of cheap goods that we could buy en masse. That's when the journey back down the mountain began. Sure you're still pretty high to start with, but you're undeniably descending.
Now we've hit a low point. Americans still want what they got used to. They still want the wages they had post-WW2 and the goods that they had access to in the 80's and 90's. The thing is though that from a capitalist mindset, the situation required the rest of the world to be in disarray and backwards. That is no longer true, and so we're not going to be returning to that. The market forces won't allow it. You can try to force it back that way through government intervention, but that's trying to fix a broken dam with a bandaid. The Democrats won't say it, nor will the Republicans, because the public doesn't want to hear the truth, and the truth is that things are going to get worse, and it's not really a "mistake" or something that you can really fix. It's simply the economy rebalancing itself. When you were on the end that was a bit too high (as we were) then that rebalance is going to hurt, but hurt feelings and fairness won't change reality.
What you're going to see is American wages continue to trend downward and foreign wages trend upwards. When the market completely stabilizes then outsourcing won't even be an issue anymore because the costs will be comparable regardless of where you setup your factory. That's the way it works. Competition tends to force the price of any commodity - be it bullets, bananas, computer memory, or even human labor - to a similar price regardless of supplier or source.
