Lincoln quibbles:

as far as proving whether Honda did offshore jobs to the US or whether they just expanded the company by opening a US mfg plant.

What's the fucking difference?!?

Creating jobs elsewhere in stead of at home is a form of "outsourcing" too, AFAICS. Like, for instance, the Dell Call Center in India that's been in the news recently (because they brought parts of it back to Texas) -- would that have been OK if they'd *founded* it in India a few years earlier, before they ever had one in the US? (And, wouldn't that have turned the "bringing back" into "Evil Outsourcing" -- *to* the US?)

One thing for sure is the reason they opened it: to get around the "voluntary" limits that Japanese car makers placed on themselves during the Reagan administration to avoid getting slapped with a US govt limit on the number of cars they sent to the US.

So, if they imposed that limit on themselves just in order not to get "slapped with a US govt limit", isn't that exactly the same as if the HAD got "slapped with a US govt limit"? Any which way you slice it, it still amounts to Evil Americans thwarting free trade in order to get jobs outsourced TO America, it seems to me.

But, just in case you don't agree(*): There is a Mercedes factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and there is BMW factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. They build German cars there. For German companies. And they employ American workers. Had European car makers placed similar "voluntary" limits on themselves, or what?

Maybe you need to climb down off that "us poor Americans, we're always the victims and never the beneficiaries of Evil Outsourcing" hobby-horse you've been prancing around on for years now.

Remember when "we're all out of $5000 Corollas, but I have a whole bunch of loaded $8000 Camrys"?

No, I don't, actually.

But I bet that must still have been a better deal than the overpriced overweight Yank crap on sale at the time.

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(*): i.e, if you want to make it even more blatantly obvious what a hypocrite you are on these issues.