Would a heavy reimportation tax discourage offshoring?

On both goods and services (customer service, accounting, medical information, etc.).

The tax might be said to represent the recognition that offshoring is nothing more than screwing the U.S. worker and the U.S. economy including smaller businesses that do not have the resources or the will to do it.

customer service and other things that are strictly telephone based?

And likely the accounting and medical information is transmitted electronically so I don't know how that would be taxed either.

I dunno. :-) I'm sure corporations keep logs of phone traffic and other transactions in order to determine how much to pay the people who perform them. How about requiring them to report those numbers?

OR USE THE VALUE ADDED TAX CONCEPT

U.S. corporations that set up manufacturing facilities in cheap labor markets abroad (China, India, etc.) and then (re)import the goods back into the U.S. to be sold to Americans (as opposed to selling the goods there where they are produced). Same for work centers in India, etc., that remotely do customer service for big U.S. banks, accounting services, medical information processing, computer programming, et al.

Not to get hung up on the semantics, call it something else if you wish.

goods there would be additional duties since they are the product of offshoring. I understand your intent, its just that its almost impossible to make that call in many cases from a legal perspective. First you would have to create an airtight legal definition of off shoring and then proves certain goods came from the process. The companies would just restructure around it.

is that trade in the historic sense involves a company and its workers in one country producing goods/services that are then exported to another country, and vice versa, while in the contemporary sense trade involves a company based in the U.S. owning and patenting an idea in the U.S., taking the idea to a cheap labor market somewhere to produce it, and then (re)importing the product/idea back into the U.S. (or to wherever) for distribution and sale. They are simply circumventing the U.S. labor market which is a drain on the U.S. economy. Cargo ships from those cheap labor markets are offloaded on both coasts daily and logs of international phone traffic and other transactions I'm sure are kept continually. It would not seem so difficult to require reporting of those manifests and logs to the taxing authority.

official structure to another country. No more outsourcing. Also no more corporate taxes.

Better solution, if a VAT is considered, is to have a two tier system. VAT coming into U.S. is higher than the VAT for products produced in the U.S. (extreme example would be no domestic VAT - then we are back to a tariff concept). Of course be prepared for the coming protectionist trade war.

If you look at duties (ie tariffs) as a percentage of tax collection, it is much lower than it was 30 years ago. The U.S. consumer benefits from lower costs and more competition. Of course those consumers, unless they work for the government, are also producers of goods which have a downward pressure being placed on them. Labor arbritrage and we are left with the percentage of industrial workers declining significantly. Eventually our wages will reach some international floor with the free trade but the lifestyle resulting from that floor is going to be pretty grim.

I think services could have a VAT assigned to them. If nothing more it the is fully loaded aggregate cost of the service worker. I think a formula could be worked out for intellectual content as well.