Barack Obama’s victory speech in South Carolina included the following line:

The Maytag worker who is now competing with his own teenager for a $7-an-hour job at Wal-Mart because the factory he gave his life to shut its doors – he needs us to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship our jobs overseas and start putting them in the pockets of working Americans who deserve it.

Presumably this refers to the United States not collecting corporate taxes on unrepatriated overseas earnings, which encourages investment abroad when foreign corporate tax rates are lower. Is it really a tax “break” if those taxes have never been collected? Significant structural changes in the global economy are driving recent outsourcing and offshoring trends, not the tax code.

And how will Obama remedy this problem? He can’t tell Democrats the fix is to lower the US corporate tax rate, and imposing taxes on foreign-incorporated subsidiaries would likely encourage parents to go abroad too.

As best I can tell, this an applause line that bears little relation to the economic issues Obama would actually need to address as president.