"Out of a job yet?"

If you have driven on the streets of Michigan you have undoubtedly passed a vehicle with a bumper sticker that reads “Out of a job yet? – Keep Buying foreign”. I have always assumed this to target drivers of foreign vehicles but it certainly could apply to other products as well.

The problem with this bumper sticker is that there are a limited number of products that are 100% American. This is especially true of automobiles where no car is 100% American. According to a report by Cars.com the “most American” automobile is the Toyota Camry and the vehicle with the most “American parts” is the Ford Taurus with only 90% of the parts for it being produced domestically. On the other end of the spectrum you will find some automobiles that are 100% foreign, none of which are produced by the Big Three. That’s not to say that buying a vehicle produced by the Big Three automatically assures you of buying a car with a high “American Made” rating as is the case with the Chevrolet Aveo, which is manufactured in Korea using only 1% American made parts, or the discontinued PT Cruiser which was assembled in Mexico with 27% domestically manufactured parts.

I have no issue with people wanting to support their brand but to paint all foreign automobile manufacturers as job killers while promoting all domestic auto manufacturers as infallible, is a misrepresentation of the facts.

The same is also true of other American companies. Wal-Mart, for example, has a long established tradition of branding themselves as a place to “Buy American”, yet a PBS article shows that during the height of this campaign 85% of the products sold at Wal-Mart were made overseas. Part of this has to do with the fact that some products, like electronics, are made almost exclusively overseas, but Wal-Mart had no problem with profiting from a very misleading claim.

Unfortunately, void of a well organized effort, we as citizens can do little to force big companies to purchase parts or products with the highest American made content. The only segment of the economy where we do have this power is in government spending and thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s (aka the Stimulus) Buy American provision (Section 1605) we did make this a priority. This sort of isolationist policy has both benefits and disadvantages.

In the end, supporting American jobs takes a lot more work than a simple minded catch phrase on a bumper sticker but if buying American is truly important to you it can be done. Just be prepared to do some research since the name on the outside isn’t necessarily a good indicator of the value of that product to American jobs.