Money Minute: Apple’s jobs claims mask global reality [Video]

What’s good for Apple is good for America -- or so the company wants us to think.

As the tech giant prepares to take the wraps off its latest iteration of the uber-popular iPad, it’s stewed up a study showing that Apple can take credit for having “created or supported” 514,000 U.S. jobs.

That’s a pretty bold claim for an enterprise that in fact has 47,000 workers on its payroll.

The Analysis Group, the consulting firm Apple hired for the study, concluded that 257,000 Apple-related jobs are in affiliated companies, such as Corning, which makes glass for the iPhone, and at a Samsung plant in Texas.

The study also finds that an additional 210,000 jobs have been born among companies creating apps for Apple devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Of course, many of those jobs are also responsible for feeding the needs of other, non-Apple companies. So how Appley they really are is in some dispute.

And here’s the big number: Apple has created far more work overseas -- an estimated 700,000 jobs in places like China and elsewhere.

Does any of this matter? Not really.

While it would be nice to say that U.S. companies employ only U.S. workers and pay only U.S. taxes and thus help fuel the U.S. economy, that’s no longer the world in which we live.

But one thing hasn’t changed: The need for U.S. companies to fly the flag from time to time and demonstrate that they’re truly American at heart.

Even when they’re not.