It makes sense. If I lost my job because someone in India could do it for pennies on the dollar, it would be great for our economy! If the same thing could be replicated across the nation, imagine the prosperity that would be created! Sure we'd all be unemployed, but imported goods wouldn't cost as much. Makes the unemployment check go a lot further when doing the household budget.
Boxer’s TV ads lately are hitting Carly Fiorina on her outsourcing of thousands of jobs during her tenure as HP CEO. Maybe there’s a rebuttal to that that satisfies bigshots in Silicon Valley, but there are far more voters than bigshots.
Outsourcing is a toxic discussion for the left, because government regulations and taxation are the primary drivers, with unions being just a bit behind those factors.
In any case, most of the foreign employees of US corporations serve foreign customers. If they get enough business over there, maybe they will just forget about the US.
If conservatives perceive the world the way socialists do, they become socialists in all but name. Free trade is just that, free trade. Free trade is fair trade in that the seller freely chooses the buyer,the buyer freely chooses the seller, and there’s no third party telling the buyer or seller what to do with their own property.
Outsourcing is just the latest incarnation of David Ricardo’s theory of Comparative Advantage. There ought to be a net gain but what is lacking is an environment free of government intervention and interference where capital that is made available from outsourcing low level work can be reinvested to create new and bigger returns.
Freetraders always scream about the “Free Market” However when it comes to the price of labor they do everything they can to use Government Policies to manipulate the laws of supply and demand. Illegal Immigration, outsourcing, H1 Visa’s, etc.
The Free Market should apply to everyone, including big business.
Outsourcing ping. And a welcome respite from all the election news.
Laying the trans-Pacific fiber optics lines in 1998-2001 caused a lot of outsourcing to be possible. This was funded by the dot-com money, and was mostly lost, except for early investors. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 meant companies like Global Crossing could go head-to-head with the Baby Bells on international phone and data services.
Over a period of about three years, from 1999 to 2002, international calls went from $2.00/minute to $0.10/minute, retail. This made outsourcing of customer service possible and profitable. Global Crossing borrowed $12 billion to build out the lines, and went bankrupt in January 2002.
Early investor Terry McAulife “invested” $100,000 and sold for only $18 million. The fact that he was chair of the DNC at the time was purely coincidental. Founder Gary Winnick sold his shares for a mere $735 million and was never charged with any crime nor fined for any action while scamming the world’s investors. And that’s how outsourcing of customer support to India, Pakistan, and the Philipines got started.
The Pacific fiber optic network, costing around $10 billion, was eventually sold to a Singapore telecom for $750 million, or slightly more than what Winnick looted. Before that, a Chinese company tried to buy Global Crossing, but US authorities under Bush stopped that deal.