Consider this: What if the issue at hand was that imported products were simply better than American made products?
How far are you willing to go to “protect” American jobs? If Americans simply suck and making parmigiano reggiano, and consumers prefer to import it from Italy (even at an inflated price), should we stop them? Should US cheese making jobs “be offshored to Italy” simply because they’re better at it? Would we all be better off eating that shit in a green container in order to keep people from being unemployed?
If you ask me, I’d rather be unemployed than forced to eat that crap. Just my two cents.
FYI I fired another guy this week. Why? Because he wasn’t willing to do high volume, low skill work. I need things put into little containers, over and over and over. The consensus I get is that Americans don’t want to do this. And I don’t blame them, it’s mind numbing, I can’t do it for more than an hour without wanting to scream.
Meanwhile I’ve got a guy from Mexico and a guy from Ecuador (both legal) that will crank it out in half the time. And I’m juggling the budget to see if I can afford to automate as much as possible.
An entire message board full of people who are out of touch with reality.
You have the Wall Street Journal recognizing that opposition to offshoring is at almost 90%. You have other authorities out there saying that you should AVOID using the words “free trade” because it pisses people off. The Economist recognizes that workers see no benefits from offshoring and that something needs to be done soon to avoid an explosion of tariffs.
You have an absolutely amazing ability to live in denial of this. You are so completely insulated from society that you don’t realize that no one is buying your bullshit arguments anymore. Your arguments in favor of offshoring are stupid, uninformed and downright clueless.
Just about everyone in America sees right through your pro-globalist scam… except your tiny little forum.
So no, what you think of me matters zilch. Because you are no more credible than the Heaven’s Gate cult.
You’re racist against America.
Everything you support is all about taking jobs away from Americans. Americans are forced to be penalized to make other nations rich.
This is going to end. We’re going to run out of jobs to give the rest of the world… then the third world is fucked. The third world cannot survive but by leeching off of us.
If you believe I have no clue what I’m talking about then I challenge you to show where offshoring has benefitted the working class.
You can’t. As I’ve said, it has done far more damage than good to the working class. I’ve outlined exactly what damage it has done and exactly how offshoring is unsustainable to the economy in general.
The pro-offshoring people here have failed to show… well… anything, really. What have they shown?
Oh and yeah, I care about the working class. No one else does. The country has set workers adrift to make do for themselves while the rich reap the rewards of globalism. I know EXACTLY what I’m talking about when I say most of the country’s wealth is going to the rich, workers’ wages are not keeping up with inflation, and job growth isn’t keeping up with population growth. You say I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, but yet you know I’m right on these points… and no one has risen to challenge those points, either.
I’m going to continue to hammer you guys on these enormous weaknesses in your flimsy arguments. But I’m the least of your worries… you’ve got a whole country that is starting to see you for the hogwash that you are. You’re world is getting smaller and smaller.
Our gardener works with an ipod, drives an import, has a smartphone, etc. Her quality of life would be much lower if she didn’t have access to all those products. She benefits from being able to afford a range of goods that would otherwise be unavailable–she wouldn’t have access to the same basket of products if each one of them was significantly more expensive.
Pay her more? We have an acre of gardens inside our lot, and already pay very well (including benefits and taxes). But if prices rose too much (including her labor), we would simply scale back our expectations or the overall garden size (i.e., let the forest encroach closer to the house).
She is a member of the “working class,” is not off-shoreable (unless we move), and benefits from the fact that Apple, Nike, Dell, and a host of other companies are able to offshore their labor costs overseas.
She also benefits from offshoring because we do that in our little company. VWorker (formerly rentacoder) is an excellent source for finding programmers. We constantly hire people from the developing world. Though we occasionally hire people from the states or western countries for job-related peculiarities, we rely on work history and ratings (VWorker has an excellent review system) to hire people at a fraction of the cost we would otherwise pay if we needed to hire a local programmer. This changes our profit margin and when necessary, our bid positioning. This makes it possible to hire gardeners, housekeepers, and nannies–people who are directly benefiting from offshoring.
[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
If you believe I have no clue what I’m talking about then I challenge you to show where offshoring has benefitted the working class.
[/QUOTE]
Considering you’ve been shown several times I have to wonder why you keep asking this. It’s like your other asinine statements that no one has challenged you on a given subject. As I’ve said before, it’s almost like you think that no one can scroll up and actually look at what was posted on pages other than the one we are currently on. Just because YOU are a pussy and have people on ignore doesn’t mean that everyone else is.
A simple answer to your question would be merely to look at US export products and services. That is workers benefiting from ‘offshoring’. It’s called ‘trade’, a concept that is seemingly beyond your admitted limited abilities to grasp. Other simple examples would be German, Japanese, etc flagged companies manufacturing plants in the US. This would be an example of US workers benefiting from ‘outsourcing’. Another simple example would be logistics and distribution companies who bring in products made in other countries and get them from the shores to the stores. Those are American workers who benefit from offshore products coming into the US. Another example would be marketing and sales.
And so on. None of this is new. All of it has been explained to you myriad times. Sadly, you are too fucking stupid to understand and too much of a pussy to have read it because the people telling you this stuff are on your idiotic ignore list.
:rolleyes: So you’re a bigot, not technically the same as a racist. Feel better about yourself?
So tell us, where will we find cheap labor in manufacturing, IT and research & development once all the nations of the world are developed economies? Are computers going to start programming themselves or something? I’m looking forward to hiring C3PO for customer service or telling him “find the cure for cancer!” Oh wait, that’s not ever gonna happen, sillyme. What’s going to happen is when we run out of places to offshore work then labor is going to go right back to being as expensive as it was when we kept the work in America. Oops.
But now we don’t have to wait that far down the line for offshoring to prove its unsustainability. We’ve got this to worry about in the very short term:
“The status quo of some countries building up huge surpluses while others run steep deficits “leads us straight into the wall of another debt crisis,” Lagarde said at a financial conference that kicks off the G-20 meeting.”
Note: he’s understating things.
And Ian Fletcher did a masterful job of explaining why America’s enormous trade deficits are adding to our national debt and devaluing our currency.
“If either is happening, America is either gradually being sold off to foreigners or gradually sinking into debt to them. Xenophobia is not necessary for this to be a bad thing, only bookkeeping: Americans are poorer simply because we own less and owe more. Our net worth is lower.”
There’s a lot of proof there in your face that offshoring is unsustainable.
I’m not a bigot, so I feel fine. Thanks for asking.
Incidentally, I’m an American who has lived my entire life in the United States. So you’re accusing me of being bigoted against myself, which is funny. Not so much a “ha ha” kind of funny as it is a sad, pitiful kind of funny.
Again, pushing the one-dimensional argument of offshoring = lower prices.
You ignored the factor that if she worked in America making the iPod she’d have a hell of a lot more money than what she’d earn being a gardener. Furthermore, if she were an iPod manufacturing worker in America, her income would be less vulnerable to rising energy/gasoline and food prices - something that seriously affects someone with a gardener’s wages, especially if they live in extreme cold zones where they also need heating oil.
Now if your response to this is that the cost of iPods would go up if they were made using American workers, you MUST then also discuss the higher productivity advantage that goes along with those higher wages. Of course you might respond then with “if this productivity advantage were true then why doesn’t Apple take advantage of it?” and I’d remind you that corporations do irrational things all the time. See: GM choosing to produce low gas mileage vehicles. I’d also point you to Toyota which produces plenty of cars in America and they pay workers Union wages, though not Union benefits; still, if I were your gardener I would much rather work in an American Toyota factory, with its far higher wages and safer (than China) workplaces.
Better yet, this same gardener could instead do bilingual technical or customer support in a variety of entry-level fields like product support or software companies. I know, I managed a few of those call centers, we pulled people off the street and trained them and they did just fine. She’d STILL make more money than you pay her, and then use that money to get educated and move up the value chain - for instance she could study to go into biotech research. It used to take only 2 years of college to get into the bottom rung of biotech research. That is, before we sent most of those jobs overseas.
All these higher-income opportunities are gone overseas now. What, pray tell, have we replaced them with? A nation of low-paid gardeners and their equivalents, that’s what. To wit: the current job recovery we are seeing is by far and large an explosion of low paying temp jobs. Look at the current underemployment stats and the U6 figures if you don’t believe me.
She’s working an ultra low paying job and is unable to get a better job even if she had the smarts for it, because she can’t afford tuition (which is ALWAYS rising faster than inflation) and the mid-range jobs that would help her pay for tuition, have gone overseas.
You’re making my point here - we’ve gone from good paying manufacturing, information technology, research and customer support jobs that supported the middle class, to low-paid gardeners.
Of course if tariffs existed on foreign tech labor
no no, wait, let’s go back in history here. Back to the 1990s, before the explosion of offshored rent-a-coder work.
Back then your gardener could have gotten into web programming with about 2 years of training and earned her own income. Web sites, back then, were exploding. Tech was evolving very quickly, and progress was moving along at breakneck speeds… without rampant offshoring.
I worked in IT during that period. I was there when we were shoveling in new talent off the streets. A lot of those people I shoveled in moved up the skills chain and became managers or started their own businesses. We weren’t being killed by good wages then, and job growth was off the charts. We could have picked up the pieces and had another job boom in the 2000’s if it weren’t for offshoring.
By the way you’re going to be hurting if your offshored coder hawks that code to your competitor. Don’t think that can happen? Ask Cisco about what Huawei did to them. Which reminds me of the other big mistake your argument is making - under the brand of “free trade” that you are defending here, what’s to stop you from being put out of business by a competitor in India hawking an identical product at cheaper prices? What happens to your gardener then? Google the word “knockoff” for a few eye-openers. Such is what you get with free trade.
Ah yes, because nannies, gardeners and housekeepers were not common before this. Nosiree. :rolleyes:
These are not benefits. Your entire argument amounts to “but at least she has cake”. Your gardener is stuck in a low paying job with little opportunity to finance a move into higher-paying work, because higher, mid-range jobs that support upward mobility have gone overseas. Those are not benefits; they are drawbacks.
The numbers clearly say that in America, we are seeing more low-paid nannies, housekeepers and gardeners at the expense of higher-paid factory workers, customer support, programmers, research and development workers (guess where all that Computer Engineering work went?), web designers, etc. etc.
But don’t you cry for those working class losers. The bell tolls for “high flyers” like you as income tax revenues continue to sag, programs continue to get cut, and lackluster consumer spending eventually catches up with your business in the form of less customers. Like I said, iPod prices are down, but energy costs are up for the very long term and that drives up EVERYTHING else, gutting the spending power of the working class. If East India’s programmers don’t out-compete your company on price you may very well lose customers because they cannot afford your products. Gardeners aren’t likely to buy a new iPod every year, much less your software.
Worse than that (for you), the U.S. dollar is depreciating, because of the trade deficits that are adding to the national debt. Certainly there are other things adding to the debt, but offshoring is helping to do damage. This means you’ll pay more for that offshore labor.
So you can’t be bigoted against yourself? Ah, yet another in a long, long list of things you’re clueless about.
Google “Michael Jackson” for an idea of how to be bigoted against yourself.
Google “Jeremiah Wright” for an idea of how to be bigoted against one’s country.
Google “Benedict Arnold” for an idea on how to sell out one’s country.
What do all three have in common? They could all think more coherently than you.
You can shut up now and go sit in the corner. Or feel free to keep making a fool of yourself. Your choice.
[QUOTE=Le Jacquelope]
Also: note the author. This is an extreme right winger. You’ve got people of all political stripes seeing this problem. You’re running out of support…
[/QUOTE]
As if being a right winger is going to get this guy any traction around here. Or as if right wingers can’t be idiotic isolationists without a clue as to how trade or the economy works. Hell…the fact that he’s a right winger actually gives him LESS credibility, you idiot. Oh…and check out the only comment for this, um, article:
Yeah…that really gives your argument weight and heft. It looks like a lot of cherry picking to me…and it’s short on citations backing up the pronouncements.
It is the same Jerome Corsi, the alarmist, doom-saying Jerome Corsi who believes 9/11 was an “inside job.” If you proudly use him a source for anything, I have to wonder if you know what you’re doing.
Oh good… a Swift Boats Vet supporter AND a 9/11 Truther! Yeah…this is exactly the kind of cite that is going to make 'dopers go ‘hm…maybe there IS something to this offshoring thingy! I mean, if a right wing Swift Boats supporter and Truther believes it, maybe…’
Let’s see if Le Jac takes another week break (and let this series of posts fade off the current page, since no one can scroll back and see what was said) and let’s this die down before coming back to make his next pronouncements with more golden cites to back up his position and keep the thread churning along for another couple pages.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Jerome or all the other more mainstream sources that actually supplied him with those stats.
You discount everyone and everything that says offshoring has done more harm than good to the economy, even though the data supports this conclusion overwhelmingly.
Jerome says 2 million Americans exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment in 2010. The real figure is 3.9 million by the end of 2010.
So his prediction of 7 million by 2011 is well on track.
Jerome says the average length of unemployment is 22 weeks. The Bureau of Labor Stats says it’s worse - over THIRTY weeks:
I can do your homework for you on all 19 points and show you that Jerome Corsi is factually correct, but all you’ll do is show off your piss poor reading skills and claim my cites don’t say what they clearly did say. It’s your standard tactic of clicking your heels three times until your wish becomes true in your head.
Basically, you are attacking the person and not the message. In reality what you should be saying is Jerome Corsi understates the impact of offshoring in your favor.
By definition, a person cannot be bigoted against him/herself.
Emphasis mine, of course. Now, please to be explaining how it’s possible for a person to be intolerant of their own beliefs and opinions.
I’m guessing that you’re referencing Michael Jackson’s skin condition. He had vitiligo, which causes depigmentation of the skin. How did this make him a bigot? Do you believe he hated being black? If that was the case, then the skin condition was kind of a happy coincidence, wasn’t it?
Strike one.
You’re probably referring to the “God damn America” speech as proof that Jeremiah Wright is bigoted against his country. Perhaps, but that’s probably because he believed the morals of the country are contrary to his own. How does this help your argument?
Strike two.
Yes, Benedict Arnold was a traitor who conspired to sell American intelligence to the British during the American Revolution. What’s your point? You think he did it because of bigotry? Are you sure it wasn’t the money? What was your point again?
Strike three.
Come on, man. You’re passing yourself off as this brilliant person who can see through the lies and corruption in the system. Is that weak-ass burn really the best you can do?
I choose option three, in which I continue to poke you with a stick for my own amusement. Now, how about a few more cites you pull at random from a Google search that you skim for key words and quote out of context?
Ah, I see. You have brain damage. That’s the only credible explanation for what you just posted. You have no respect for your country or yourself. You’re not only bigoted against yourself you’re bigoted against this country.
If it weren’t for your parents’ trust fund money a feeble minded fool like you would be the first to be victimized by the consequences of your… “reasoning”. You’re the kind of person whose low paying job gets outsourced first. Or replaced by machines.
It looks like a lot of cherry picking to me…and it’s short on citations backing up the pronouncements.