When a brouhaha erupted over a Mitt Romney campaign ad noting that Chrysler was going to build Jeeps in China and that that meant taking jobs offshore, the car company went nuts and Romney was pilloried in the Ohio press and elsewhere. He was slammed by the Barack Obama campaign. Chrysler said it wouldn’t be moving any jobs offshore, but admitted that it was building a plant on the other side of the Pacific to serve an expanding market for Jeeps in China.

This sparked another argument in the Herald newsroom (see item above). The same colleague who argued that a woman should be denied a ballot because her driver’s license had been revoked argued doggedly that the term “offshoring” can only apply when current jobs in the U.S. are moved to a foreign country, resulting in a smaller workforce at home.

By contrast, I maintained the obvious: Chrysler will, in fact, be manufacturing products offshore using a non-U.S. workforce. And that’s a loss of demand for U.S. labor, while profits from a new China operation will fatten the bottom line of an American company. If that’s not “offshoring” I don’t know what is. There is demand for Jeeps in China, and more aggregate labor is needed to produce them. But Americans won’t be doing the work.

Seems to me that Chrysler could build Jeeps in the U.S. using an American workforce, and then ship the vehicles to China. That would help our balance of trade immensely, wouldn’t it? That’s one of the things that’s killing the dollar against the yuan. Romney was right, and American auto workers ought to be ticked. But, hey, don’t listen to me. What do I know?