However, remember NAFTA? Nobody seemed to care about the little guy and the displacement of HIS job back then. No, he was going to be better off, because he would simply be forced to go back to school and earn his MBA, of course (naturally, we have such brilliant people as NAFTA-backers to thank for that type of insight. :rolleyes: )
Now, Lou Dobbs and other conservative commentators are saying, wait a minute! You can’t outsource upper middle-class jobs to India! You CAN’T! Stop it now! :dubious:
Uh-huh. Sorry. Karma’s a bitch, Lou.
They can always go back to school and earn Ph.D.'s, right?
Seriously, maybe Pat Buchanan is right - we need a third party since Democrats and Republicans alike spout this crap that losing jobs is a good thing in the end.
And what I don’t like about Democrats is that at the time, there seems to have been a kind of under-the-breath rhetoric that who cares about those racist white trash factory guys, anyway? They’re scum. Well, you see, if you Democrats wonder why the white trash guy votes Republican, just consider NAFTA/globalization, i.e., YOU DON’T WANT TO HELP HIM - at least Republicans recognize that everyone’s job is important to them.
As I remember, though, NAFTA was as much a Republican boondoggle as a Democratic one. Bush Sr was certainly deep in the planning of it while he was pres.
Well, it happened, so it’s water under the bridge, but you can see that Democrats always talk like the little guy should vote for them because they’re there to help him, but then Clinton gets up and pushes for NAFTA, and Democrats fall in line, and after everything is said and done, the little guy remembers that the Democrats were supposed to help THEM, the little guy, and they sold out. Republicans have never pretended that they were a party for the little guy; what they’ve always said (traditionally) is that we want to lower your taxes and let people do what they want to do, with as little government interference as possible. With Democrats, you have high taxes, more government interference, and boondoggles like NAFTA to outsource your job - the worst possible scenario.
Yeah! Fuck globalization! We deserve a comfortable lifestyle WAY more then Indians do!
I’m actually in IT, so I’m quite bipolar about this topic. One minute, I’m scared of loosing my job and having to take a major paycut, the next, I’m thinking the standard of living in India is a tad bit worse then the US, and they can probably use the money better then I. Then I realize that most of the money they save relocating positions like mine to India will trickle up the pyramid scheme that is the American Corporation and make the well off even more financially secure, and I’m right back to the start of the cycle.
I am about as pro-NAFTA as one could reasonably be, but the whole ‘deserve’ argument is fucking assine. It has nothing to do with who ‘deserves’ what. I give not one fuck about the standard of living in India (let them divert some of the nuclear weapons money, if it is such a concern). To base trade policy on what some other country ‘deserves’ is truly scraping at the bottom of the stupid-bin.
Oh, absolutely. Fairness and consideration for the citizens of other countries have absolutely no place in trade policy. Those fuckng Vietnamese catfish farmers can take their evil commie fish and shove 'em! Our catfish farmers are the only ones that matter. Preach on, brother.
What the hell is your point? When have I, or any other of the many pro-free trade folks at this board expressed support for pro-American protectionist catfish policy? Government sponsored protectionism, be it for perceived profit or clueless ‘fair trade’, is wrong at multiple levels for any country, America included.
I think one of the reasons pro-American protectionist catfish policy is wrong is because the Vietnamese catfish farmers deserve (oh no, the “d” word) to be treated fairly.
In general, I think it’s reasonable to consider the impact of our foreign policies (including trade policy) on the citizens of the countries that we deal with. I don’t think they deserve to be harmed because of “perceived profit” or “clueless ‘fair trade’”. It’s too bad compassion is at the bottom of the stupid bin.
Lou Dobbs is the most idiotic finger-in-the-ear-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you constipated intellectually vacuous ideologically blinded babbling piece of flesh on TV right now.
His continuous deliberate conflation of illegal aliens, skilled legal temporary workers, crime, out-sourcing and free trade is downright dishonest. Worse, he invites experts who present various facets to these issues, and all he does is smirk, ask them loaded questions, smirk more, bid them a polite goodbye while reminding the viewers of how he leads the intellectual debate on these issues, then gets back to the monomaniacal rhetoric next show having blissfully fogotten the stuff that was discussed the previous show.
And the letters, don’t get me started on their tedious sameness.
"In general, I think it’s reasonable to consider the impact of our foreign policies (including trade policy) on the citizens of the countries that we deal with. " -Metacom
Why? Do other countriies offer us this consideration?
No?
Then fuck em. The job of the Government of the United States is to act in the best interest of the people of the United States. Not France. Not Brazil. Not Cambodia. Not Canada. Not the UK.
The United States. I’m all for protectionism when appropriate. Not across the board, since we supposedly believe in a free market economy. OTOH, for those jobs which comprise the bulk of our tax base? Yes. Sorry Mr. Vietnameese catfisherman. Nothing personal, you understand. The OTHER option is to increase corporate taxes or taxes against wealthier folks in order to make up the shortfall. Which is fine too. Either or will do.
We ought to let the CEO’s know that for every American job moved overseas THEIR PERSONAL tax burden will be increased by that much. That’s the stick. The carrot is that for every new job created their personal tax burden will be lowered some amount (obviously less than the new job tax revenue otherwise it’s a pointless excercise).
Michael Dell, your income tax this year is 2 BILLION dollars.
There’s one thing I love about the anti-globalization crowd. Where else will you find an earth loving flag burnin’ anti-capitalist dirt munching druid and a bible thumping flag waving resource hogging anti-government nut on the same side of an issue? NAFTA wasn’t just endorsed by people on the right it was also endorsed by some on the left. It was opposed by some on the left as well as some on the right.
The Joel On Softwaremessage board is full of people freaking out about IT outsourcing, so much so that Joel is now making sarcastic “maybe I should create a ‘bitching about outsourcing’ forum” comments.
The whole thing smacks of the H-1B hysteria of a few years ago, where everyone in IT in America was going to be a minimum wage-earning Indian on a visa. Didn’t happen, and as someone who’s job was getting H-1Bs for the company, the structural problems with doing so should have been obvious to anyone who thought about it for a few moments–extra administrative overhead for H-1Bs cancelling any advantage from lower wages, extended time off for visa renewals, and Federal Marshals and FBI questioning your less-than-lily-white employees and threatening to deport them or send them to Guantanamo (two of our employees, in fact), for example.
Likewise, we’re already seeing the structural problems from outsourcing: Dell’s customer service going through the floor, companies finding that it’s really hard to sue someone in India who steals your IP, competition for outsourcing in India raising prices to the point that advantage disappears…
That’s what makes Lou and his ilk so fucking irritating. The Yellow Peril of the 80s is now the Medium Brown Peril, and is just about as threatening. You’d think someone would learn after the first few rounds of scaremongering.
Not that it makes losing a job easier, but this happens all the time. One unemployment problem (here in the US) is an economic opportunity for others. It reduces costs for the corporation. I’ll just ignore the potential race to the bottom for the purposes of this post.
My biggest problem is with executive compensation. Why not look there for cost reductions first? Never mind. That was a rhetorical question.
Corporate management should be policed better by the boards of directors. They don’t. As a result, I have to hear about companies losing money paying nine figure salaries to idiots. Grrr…
Well, I guess what Dobbs et al are saying is that the number of jobs is some sort of zero-sum calculation, is that it?
I don’t agree and in any event I say let 'em flow where they will. The sooner that other countries rise to the economic standard of the US, the sooner they’ll flow back.
Not entirely on topic, perhaps, but I’ll throw a few other, perhaps shallow, thoughts into the discussion. I work for an international oilfield services company that is not headquartered in the US. We’d be more than happy to employ more Americans internationally, but they are simply too expensive relative to any other country from which we can hire, including in Europe.
While the recent fall of the dollar relative to the Euro may be changing the situation, as of late last year the local operation had by far the highest per-capita personnel costs of the fifty-odd countries in which we currently operate. Also, when US recruitment prospects hear the salaries we are willing to pay for jobs outside the US, few are interested. Since for us there is no particular skill or productivity advantage in hiring Americans at a signficant premium, for jobs outside the US, none get hired, except for the US operation. Even there, in recent years we have been getting little response by native-born Americans to our recuitment efforts. Most of the responses tend to be from recent immigrants, primarily from India and Pakistan, and thus they get most of the placements. This ain’t digging ditches here, either. Our field jobs require a degree of technical skill and there is a clear career advancement path for those who are willing to put in a bit of effort.
U.S. unemployment rate in 1994, the year the FTA was expanded to NAFTA: 6.6 percent
Today, after ten years of NAFTA: 5.7 percent.
I would like someone to provide me with some objective evidence that NAFTA is reducing the number of jobs available to Americans. We are seeing here a uniquely Internet-based phenomenon; people claiming that a policy is causing unemployment, when in fact unemployment is down over the lifetime of the policy.
Maybe the reason programmers are having trouble finding work is because there’s too many of them hanging around San Jose expecting $100,000 salaries after the Internet bubble burst. I don’t know exactly why they seem to be having so much trouble in some places, but I’ll tell you, when I check the job web sites a third of the posted jobs are for IT and programming positions to be filled right here in North America. Everyone and their dog needs AS/400 programmers, database programmers, you name it.
For the hell of it I checked Workopolis to see how many computer-skill-related jobs are available in the Toronto area today. The number of jobs posted yesterday for IT related jobs is in the hundreds, far more than any other field of work. And they’re not just a bunch of temp placements; some of these are damned good jobs. They all require skills, not just “I know HTML” type stuff, but there are a vast array of jobs here. Note that Canada’s unemployment rate is 2% higher than the U.S.
Like anyone else, but perhaps to a greater degree than some, computer IT/programming folks seem to think their little corner of the economy is the WHOLE economy, and that the State of Silicon Valley is the state of the entire economy. My best friend works for Cisco in SJ, and he just cannot get past the mental block that the computer industry is the entire economy. (He also does not seem to understand why programmers at Cisco insisting on $100,000+ salaries might have something to do with Cisco looking to India for programming skills.) I’m sorry, guys, but it was your industry that was overvalued on the stock market 250 times over. It’s now valued at what it’s really worth. Too many people were making too much money in it and it’s back to earth. The rest of the economy is actually doing a lot better for having NAFTA.
By and large NAFTA is working, by any objective standard.
