President Barack Obama has stated that he intends to rebuild or create millions of American jobs in the coming years by doubling America’s exports around the globe.

The plan has a few key design flaws.

First and foremost, the U.S. cannot just press a button and double its productivity. You cannot create productivity to create jobs. You can create jobs and then create productivity, but the administration is not talking about hiring a slew of federal salaried workers to make cars, toys and computer chips.

Second, the rest of the world is not clamoring for American-made goods. This is a recession; they want to make their own goods and hire their own workers. International trade has taken a hit during the past two years. A country like Germany, which is relatively stable and still has a prosperous and wealthy middle class, is going to discourage imports from the U.S., China, and everywhere else as much as it can. Germany does not even want imports from the rest of the E.U., so they certainly want as little as possible from the U.S.

Third, there is no money out there to purchase American goods. This is a recession; people are tightening their purse strings whenever and wherever they can. The Obama administration should have caught on to this fact when 80 percent of their $310 billion tax rebate “stimulus” ended up in bank savings accounts.

America has no capacity to make goods for export. The world has no money available to buy such exports. And the world has an economic interest to ignore our exports right now anyway as a means of shoring up their own domestic economy.

Exporting more would certainly be nice, and it is an endearing goal toward which this country should strive. It is not a final solution.

Mark Richards, writing for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, published a column on July 7 outlining a few things that would be a better outlet for the president’s time and effort.

Instead of worrying about creating these mythical millions of jobs through mythical exports, the White House would be better off saving the jobs that we still have.

As Richards points out, a strange consequence of Congress deciding to ban Mexican truckers from operating deep into the U.S. has been the loss of perhaps tens of thousands of jobs. Allowing cheaper Mexican truckers to drive routes created jobs for manufacturing companies. Losing cheap freight caused many companies to go under. Still others were doomed by a Mexican ban on the goods they produced.

When the U.S. banned Mexico’s truckers, Mexico imposed a totally legal tariff on 90 U.S. exports to its southern neighbor. Mexico now makes them on its own or imports them from somewhere else.

This is not an argument in favor of NAFTA; if NAFTA had never existed Mexico wouldn’t have been able to get upset about the ban or impose a tariff in retaliation. Instead, it is an argument for using some degree of foresight.

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