It’s been a banner week for Apple. With Apple’s announcement of Q1 2012 results, the company is now apparently worth more than Greece.

In the same week, the President of the United States invoked the late Steve Jobs and Apple in his Congressionally-mandated State of the Union address.

Just a few hours later, in the GOP response to the President’s speech, Governor Mitch Daniels also played the Steve Jobs card, saying “The late Steve Jobs — what a fitting name he had — created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew.”

Partisanship aside, certainly Apple has created a lot of jobs over the years. But today, most of the jobs created by Apple are not American jobs, they’re sweatshop-style jobs for miserable, overworked workers in China.

According to the New York Times, Apple employs 43,000 people in the United States. That’s not an inconsiderable number of people. However, Apple no longer builds its own devices. There was a time when Apple computers were actually manufactured in the United States. Today, Apple products are built in China. Foxconn City has 230,000 people working to make iPhones and iPads — and Presidential candidate Rick Santorum claims more than 500,000 peopl....

In other words, Apple provides jobs to more than 10 times more employees outside the United States than in the United States.

But Apple is a U.S. company. We know it is because both the President and the loyal opposition just pointed to it (or to the Dearly Departed, in any case) as a model for American business.

Let’s look at that model, shall we? According to the Apple earnings call, the company had a whopping $97.6 billion (yes, billion) dollars in cash at the end of December. Unfortunately, about two-thirds of that money, “about $64 billion,” was “offshore” at the end of December, according to Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer.

That’s a lot of money for an American company to keep outside of America.

In fact, MG Siegler of TechCrunch raises a rather disturbing allegation. He says, “$64 billion of that is offshore, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer stated during the call — meaning, it would cost money (taxes) to bring it back into the U.S.”

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