On manufacturing policy, White House remains in grip of “ratchet-down” consultants

At the conference, President Obama commended the business leaders for their patriotism and said that creating jobs in the U.S. is “part of the responsibility that comes with being a leader in America — a responsibility not just to the shareholders or the stakeholders, but to the country that made all this incredible wealth and opportunity possible.”

Mark Price, an economist at the Keystone Research Center, a think tank in Harrisburg, Pa., said that any implication that the corporate leaders featured at the event were motivated by patriotism “deserves mockery.”

“If we’re talking about large multinational companies, they are governed by profit and loss, not by any notion of national allegiance,” Price said.

Ironically, it was one of the speakers at the event who provided the strongest evidence against the claim that patriotism was driving business decisions. Hal Sirkin, one of the co-authors of the BCG report, told the Associated Press, “It’s a simple mathematical equation [that is] changing…It’s not about the patriotism — although I know everybody on stage with me here is just as patriotic. But it is about the underlying economics.”