Cheap overseas labor is what happened to the jobs.
We could outlaw unions, cut corporate taxes to zero, and eliminate every regulation on the books and that would do nothing to change the fact that foreigners will work for a fraction of their American counterparts.
What about infrastructure? We need to get going with manual labor but costs are sky high. The thing companies were hoping for was affordable healthcare which adds to the cost of their product but Repubs put the kibosh on that.
There is a lot that can be looked at but not with all of the infighting in congress.
"Cheap Labor" overseas is a mentally lazy explaination: Plenty of "cheap labor" jobs exist in the USA. Ask a Mexican.
You have been somewhat misinformed.
Even the illegals working in the USA are making more money than most workers in China, sport.
The median factory workers pay is $300 a month in China.
www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/.../08wages.html
The reason people don't work, is simply because they don't need to because government subsidizes unemployment: Show me an industrialised nation where there are higher subsidies for being unemployed, and I'll show you a country where unemployment is high.
Sheer coporate apologist nonsense.