[WilliamofCarmichael]

RE: "Writers on this topic keep spewing this comment. They fail to observe that the outsourced jobs are in the new industries. None of them has managed to point to what "new" industries are prepared to employ the 4,000 to 6,000 people who get dumped on the street each day. They were not making buggy whips. They were employed at the forefront of technology. Most have 4 year degrees and many years of experience."

That's an excellent point.

Many losing their jobs, I might add, are refugees from factory offshoring who retrained for the promise of better jobs. Now combine the quote from above with a post from another thread. To wit,

"The offshoring model in fact is the opposite of free trade. It is not trade at all but labor arbitrage. Unlike real arbitrage, the act of exploiting the wage differences is not ending the arbitrage opportunity. US companies create captive offshore centers in which the local employees are used to fulfill demand in the US while their wages are kept isolated from that same world demand."

See also the writings of Stephen Roach.

This ain't your great-grandfather's Ricardo. This is about a glut of readily available cheap labor worldwide and IMO is more akin to 19th century capitalism instead of comparative advantages among free trading countries. Fine.

There's also the those pesky "capitalists" depending upon tax supported Ex-IM Bank, OPIC, special programs, etc. Not so fine, IMO. But it's a riot hearing free traders complain about government "interfering" with capitalism when their pocketbooks are threatened. "Capitalism" has come to mean always having government money there if and when a capitalist needs it? Hands off! everybody else?

RE: "Few of the rockets that put the satellites into orbit were privately financed by the companies that now exploit them."

That's another taxpayer service, all the risks and R&D that built the rockets and facilities. BTW, I thought most of what makes cross-border IT-enabled services possible was the cheap underseas bandwidth.

[calawah98]

I just heard on the local news, out of Seattle, that if you have your income tax prepared by an accountant, ask the accountant if they send your income tax return to a company over seas, such as India to be prepared? India was the only country mentioned, but that does not mean they are sent to an other country, another plus for out sourcing. Your identity could be stolen, is what the news reporter said.
This seams to be the normal way any more for your taxes to be done.

[Myrddin]

BTW, I thought most of what makes cross-border IT-enabled services possible was the cheap underseas bandwidth.

Yes. The undersea cables were placed before we figured out the world of satellites. Network routing rules prohibit a voice path from traversing both forward and reverse paths via satellite because of the huge delay introduced.

I'm a former Bell System employee and very familiar with the helps and hindrances that government introduced into the telecom industry from the earliest days. Anyone who doubts the ability of government to lay taxes and tariffs on telecom need look no further than the monthly bill. I get my wireless activity in excruciating detail...along with some general taxes. The excruciating detail that you see in the billing records is evidence of the fine granularity of modern billing systems. It would be simple to impose targeted tariffs. Custom programming of the operational support systems was my specialty before I left PacBell.

[FreedomPoster]

>>BTW, I thought most of what makes cross-border IT-enabled services possible was the cheap underseas bandwidth.

Exactly correct. Undersea cables are where the big bandwidth happens.

A great (and very lengthy) Wired magazine article on the history of undersea cables is here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html?pg=1

[Sender]

I worry about the same thing, that the types of jobs leaving the US are not merely manufacturing or farm labor but rather our intellectual capital. The very high tech jobs such as writing software code for future networks and operating systems are not just "retraining opportunities", these jobs are more or less eternal jobs of the future now that they're here...we will always need new software written, etc.

So if irresistable economic forces push all the software and chip fab technology etc out to the low wage countries, I am not sure what all the displaced tech workers will be "retrained" to do. Perhaps this is all part of the "great circle of life", hakuna matata and all. Perhaps the US is cycling back towards a time in which we will largely work in retail and service industries, grow food for the rest of the world, and buy our technology from them. I wonder what kind of license fees China and India will demand for keeping my PC running? Maybe it will become too expensive to support the Indian IT workers lavish lifestyle and Chinese companies will sub the work out to us?

/rant off