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This is all about their bottom line and they have determined that they would rather not pay an American programmer $75,000 to do a job that an Indian and Chinese programmer can do for 1/3 of that.

There you have it. Why this is outrageous is what gets me. A confluence of advances in transportation, communication, training and education, and foreign countries' politics has created the opportunity for businesses to improve their bottom line. That's what businesses are supposed to do.

The trick for the U.S. is developing policies that make doing business in America, and employing U.S. citizens, the better business position. Some people think that means taxing the crap out of anything that moves in from outside our boundaries. I've never thought that raising taxes on anything was a good idea, but I could be wrong.

I don't know what the solutions are, but I'm not reading many viable options here, either.

here's an easy one: tax their US profits on a sliding scale in proportion to their relative levels of employment in the US. So if Intel makes 60% of their profits in the US, and their workforce is 60% US, they pay no incremental. But if HP makes 95% of their profit in the US, and 30% of their workforce is offshore, they get hit with a surcharge.

The point is: we must raise the cost of employing offshore labor, because the alternative is that the cost of US labor must fall to that level, and that means that either the US standard of living for those workers will also fall to that level, or that our workers will abandon that field and turn it all over to foreign production and employment. The latter is happening now, applications to law schools are bulging while people are bailing out of engineering.