Have American companies perceived to be the outsourcing kings finally reached the tipping point of shame as public opinion turns against them in a country with official unemployment over nine percent and under-employment reaching about one in four Americans?

Maybe.

General Electric, also vilified in the press after it was revealed that the highly profitable company not only paid no income taxes in 2010, but reaped a $3.2 billion tax benefit. The New York Times reported that the company has become incredibly adept at dodging taxes. “[GE's] extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore,” wrote the Times.

Maybe in an effort to stave off gibbering mobs carrying torches and pitchforks, the company would appear to be oh-so-generously bringing a few jobs back onto U.S. soil, mostly because the company realizes that having so much of its technological secrets in the hands of non-employees isn't very good for business.

Blooomberg writes today that CEO Jeffrey Immelt (who is also an adviser to the Obama administration) says GE plans to add more than 15,000 jobs in the next three years. About 1,100 of those jobs will be just outside Detroit in a center for information technology. So far, GE has hired about 660 people in Michigan, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.

“About 50 percent of the IT work was being done by non-GE employees,” Charlene Begley, chief information technology officer, said in an interview at the center. “That strategy may have had its time, but there was a lot of downside. We lost a lot of the technical capabilities that we have to own.”

GE isn't he first company to find out that IT outsourcing isn't working so well as it once was.

Outsourcing consulting company TPI revealed that the global value of IT outsourcing contracts dropped by 20 percent in the first half of this year, with the biggest fall being in the second quarter, which saw a tumble of 51 percent, according to TPI data released July 20.

What many of these companies...like GE...won't tell you is that one of the things that is luring them back to U.S. shores is huge taxpayer-funded incentives being dangled by state governments desperate to get their citizens back to work. According to GE CEO Immelt, while his company is investing $100 million into the new Michigan facilities, state officials are kicking in more than $60 million of incentives over 12 years.

That amount should pay two or three executive bonuses, anyway.