The jobs debate in America heated up considerably this month. And while no one seems to question whether ratcheting up the rhetoric on jobs is the right thing to do, I worry about it. I worry because America doesn’t have a jobs problem. We have a supply problem.

U.S. companies have excess capacity for producing goods and services compared to the current level of global demand. So before we can put significant numbers of unemployed Americans back to work, we have to deal with the root cause of our undersupply of jobs, which is oversupply in our economy.

Oversupply simply means we have too much inventory of goods compared to the demand. For example, General Motors had to resize to a smaller company with fewer brands, because not enough people were buying their cars. They are a healthier company without Saturn, Saab, Hummer, Pontiac and Oldsmobile. But as a smaller company, they will produce less.

The ugly but inescapable reality is that fixing that problem will take at least two to three years. And fixing it, I believe, means lowering corporate taxes so that they take the money they have parked overseas and invest it in the United States.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a study earlier this month in support of a one-time tax break for U.S. corporations on foreign earnings. Various estimates say that there is at nearly $1.5 trillion parked overseas because U.S. tax laws make it too expensive to bring home. The study says that a tax holiday would result in about half of that money returning to the U.S. and becoming available for investment here, creating 2.9 million jobs over the next two years.

On September 8, President Obama made a jobs speech to both houses of Congress calling for payroll tax cuts and spending on infrastructure to get Americans back to work. The following Monday he delivered a nearly $450 billion jobs bill–a government stimulus package that the administration says will create 1.9 million jobs. (Former labor secretary, Robert Reich and others agreed with the need for another government stimulus, but suggest that $450 billion is not enough to make a difference. I agree.)