How Steve Jobs would have answered the debate question on Apple

"IPad, the Macs, the iPhones, they are all manufactured in China," CNN’s Candy Crowley said. "One of the major reasons is labor is so much cheaper [there]. How do you convince a great American company to bring that manufacturing back here?" Here’s how Apple’s Steve Jobs would have answered.

It is easy to build a factory in China and it is almost impossible to do so these days in America, largely because of regulations and unnecessary costs. The US needs to train more American engineers. A s Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs reports: "Apple had 700,000 factory workers employed in China, [Jobs] said, and that was because it needed 30,000 engineers on-site to support those workers. 'You can't find that many in America to hire,' he said. These factory engineers did not have to be PhDs or geniuses; they simply needed to have basic engineering skills for manufacturing. Tech schools, community colleges or trade schools could train them. 'If you could educate these engineers,' he said, 'we could move more manufacturing plants here.' The argument made a strong impression on the president. Two or three times over the next month he told his aides, 'We've got to find ways to train those 30,000 manufacturing engineers that Jobs told us about.'"