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I'm not blaming Bush for this, but its a big problem for our country and our party, and he is the president, its his problem now.

We can be sure that everyone in the White House remembers what happened to Bush-41. They are well aware that if the economy is not obviously in recovery by next Summer, Bush could be toast.

I don't know what they could do that they aren't already doing: tax cuts, deficit spending out the wazoo, near-zero interest rates... they have their feet on all the right pedals. Now it's pretty much stay the course and pray.

I think this "outsourcing to India" thing has its own magic and may have to be handled explicitly for political reasons. A lot of these jobs that are going to India are precisely the ones the domeheads told all the young people to prepare for, so as to protect themselves from third-world competitors. "Oh yeah, high tech, there's your salvation. Splat!"

We lived through the big "Japan will put us out of business" scare of the 1970's, and watched them go into the tank instead of us. So it's not like we aren't resilient folks around here. But Japan was not really a low-cost labor competitor. Certainly not by the 1970's. They beat us on technology, and on process. They had been listening to Deming when we ignored him. The truth is, American cars really weren't all that good back then, and our own Big 3 needed a swift kick in the butt.

It's hard to see where that fits our high tech industry. We're kicking butt around the world, in hardware and software, except for the manufacutring of these little commodity pieces that aren't where the value-added is anyway. The India thing is a pure direct-labor-substitution play, and in skill sets that typically require university degrees in the U.S. OK, Mr. Domehead Smartypants, where do we go to hide from that?

If I were Rove, I would have a plan in the can on this one, and get it out there before the Democrats finish theirs. Bush has to be seen doing something about this, not just the economy-in-general. The programmers may be the ones in the news, but India has medical doctors reading X-Rays for U.S. hospitals, under outsourcing contracts. If they can do that, there's no skill set you could acquire where you can hide from those guys. This is just plain going to scare people, and that's a political problem, not an economic one.

The programmers may be the ones in the news, but India has medical doctors reading X-Rays for U.S. hospitals, under outsourcing contracts.

That's not the only thing. H-1B doctors have already started to replace American physicians locally. They are promoted by provider groups as reducing HMO costs and not subject to state licensing and litigation laws. I wonder what happens when an unlicensed, incompetent Indian doctor kills a patient in surgery? What does the HMO say then? "Yes, but they sure work cheap."

. . . there's no skill set you could acquire where you can hide from those guys. This is just plain going to scare people, and that's a political problem, not an economic one.

You are so right about this. It's easy for the free traders whose own jobs they see as immune to sneer at those Americans whose livlihood has been destroyed. They don't realize that if a job can be done in front of a computer screen, it can be done overseas. And that includes everything short of manual labor. And we've got the illegals to do that.