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III. Outsourcing and Insourcing

Forrester Research estimates 3.5 million outsourced jobs between 2000 and 2015. (Forrester Research)

Over the past decade, 7.71 million jobs, on average, are lost every quarter as part of the normal flux of the economy. Forrester’s estimate would account for less than one percent of the jobs lost each quarter, on average. (Source: Department of Labor, Business Employment Dynamics Data Series; Forrester Research)

Today, more than 5.4 million jobs in America are the result of insourcing—that is, they have been outsourced from abroad into the United States. (Source: Organization for International Investment)

Annually, these insourced jobs account for $307 billion in wages and salaries. (Source: Organization for International Investment)

Insourced jobs pay, on average, 19.1 percent more than the average job in the United States. (Source: Organization for International Investment)

In the first quarter of 2004, just 4,633 workers were laid off as a result of offshore outsourcing due to mass layoffs—about 2 percent of total mass job layoffs. (Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Extended Mass Layoffs Associated With Domestic and Overseas Relocations”)

In terms of the industries affected and positions potentially at risk, the use of outsourcing has changed little over the past five years. In other words, this is no rapidly accelerating trend. (Source: Government Accountability Office, “International Trade: Current Government Data Provide Limited Insight into Offshoring of Services”)

The United States exports more business, technical, and professional services than it imports (and offshore outsourcing of service work is synonymous with importing those services). In 2003, the trade surplus for these services was $27.0 billion. (Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Survey of Current Business”)

Source: The Heritage Foundation [Free Republic]

Here's what the answer is: If you place punitive taxes on U.S. companies that off-shore employees, then soon you will have no more U.S. companies.

There are two answers to that:

1) Companies that are interested in supporting American sales will not pull out of America. They survived and profited before outsourcing, and they will survive on American labor again (FYI, I firmly believe that the deliberate destruction of the American economy will be ended one day, either by legislation or rebellion. I have many bullets to fire before I will accept a third world standard of living in the name of "free trade").

2) If the companies pull out, I say good riddance. In a capitalist economy, new companies will spring up to fill the void. We just need to ensure that companies fleeing America aren't permitted to import their goods here anymore.

The outsourcing capitalists are playing a shell game with the American economy that, in the end, will cost everybody. To those of you who shug their shoulders and take such a "that's life" attitude toward the whole thing should read your history books...the people will not long tolerate a government that tells them to take thier oppression with a smile simply because it profits our corporate masters. Jefferson once said that all governments eventually become corrupt, and our own government is well down that road with the internationalists and Trotskyists invading the high offices and placing the good of the American people in a position secondary to their main goal...the imposition of a global economic and regulatory system under the thumb of the United States, in which a relatively small group of Americans will profit at the expense of their fellow Americans and the rest of the planet.