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Outsourcing question

XMan

XMan

Lifer
How many foreign companies outsource jobs to the United States, and how many jobs would this total?

I know a lot of foreign car makers have plants in the US . . . wouldn't a protectionist act by the US to punish domestic companies for outsourcing have a negative impact on jobs outsourced here by foreign companies?

How about we try for a civil discussion here . . . I'm not trollin' . . . 😀
 
The big difference is are blue collar jobs being outsourced or white collar jobs.
Where few white collar jobs are sent to the US unless it is in management to support blue collar jobs.

Economic differences and the cost of materials/support play into the discussion greatly.
 
Paul Sameulson, a nobel prize winning economist has recently said that outsourcing and the trade gap in general are not all wine and roses for the US economy.

Popular among economists, that is. That untruth, Samuelson asserts in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, is the assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of international trade, including the outsourcing abroad of call-center and software programming jobs.

Sure, Samuelson writes, the mainstream economists acknowledge that some people will gain and others will suffer in the short term, but they quickly add that "the gains of the American winners are big enough to more than compensate for the losers."

That assumption, so widely shared by economists, is "only an innuendo," Samuelson writes. "For it is dead wrong about necessary surplus of winnings over losings."

Trade, in other words, may not always work to the advantage of the American economy, according to Samuelson.
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link
 
You failed to cite the whole article, whereby the counter argument was proposed.

Samuelson is (quite rightly) advocating a more nuanced view of the trade debate. He is essentially saying that the bad may outweigh the good in the long term. This is merely an appeal to rationality, so that over-simple economic theories are not taken with a religious faith. He reduces the question to an empirical one, where one must weigh the benefits of trade with it's costs, and acknowledge the possibility that you may come up losers. This means that monitoring the data and making reasonable predictions is neccessary.

Bagwahati agrees with Samuelson on that count. He also makes some excellent criticisms of Samuelson's empirical assumptions. Look at the actual data regarding the extent of outsourcing. The numbers, IIRC, are not that scary, especially when compared to the overall drop in your employment level (which is a bit scary). Outsourcing is not your problem.
 
Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Welcome to Capatalism in action. Anything goes in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Outsourced jobs aren't coming back.
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Ideally we should drastically reduce our standard of living so we can afford to be paid much less per hour and those jobs will come back.

Zephyr
 
Originally posted by: X-Man
How many foreign companies outsource jobs to the United States, and how many jobs would this total?

I know a lot of foreign car makers have plants in the US . . . wouldn't a protectionist act by the US to punish domestic companies for outsourcing have a negative impact on jobs outsourced here by foreign companies?

How about we try for a civil discussion here . . . I'm not trollin' . . . 😀
Click to expand...

The foreign companies are selling the cars here to US consumers. When US companies outsource, they turn around and ship the items/service back to the US for US consumers. Big difference IMO. I have no problems with companies hiring foreign workers if they want to expand their foreign markets but they are just shipping jobs overseas in order to sell here.
You move enough good paying jobs overseas, pretty soon, you will only have service sector jobs and people working for the gov't.
 
Originally posted by: Zephyr106
Originally posted by: 0marTheZealot
Welcome to Capatalism in action. Anything goes in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

Outsourced jobs aren't coming back.
Click to expand...

Ideally we should drastically reduce our standard of living so we can afford to be paid much less per hour and those jobs will come back.

Zephyr
Click to expand...

I believe that IS the master plan. It will happen slowly, but surely and will be aided by a falling dollar. We will also lose our perks, benifits, and rights as we pursue the holy grail of "more jobs".


"They led us from the edge of greatness to the edge of a cliff, and it's time to lead them out of town." John Edwards
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Nice quote in your sig, chowderhead. 🙂
 
thier is no stopping outsorsing without getting rid of free trade. its not bushes fault its not no ones. if a company can hire two people to do the same job as someone in the US for cheaper thier going to do it. the only way this will stop is when the world has caught up to us in standard of living. it will proubly take 50 years for this to happen though. so I suggest we all get jobs in the service industry they can't export those.
 
Also this whole problem is mainly the unions fault. thier is no reason for some guy on an assembly line to make upwards of 50-60k a year just because he's been thier for over 10 years.
 
Reducing our standard of living? BWAHAHAHAHAH? IN AMERICA? THAT'S UNAMERICAN!!!!!!

Seriously though, who is going to advocate that? Rich white men that have everything to lose by saying that? The CEOs of Mercedes, Chrysler, etc etc all benefit from us consuming far too much. They spend BILLIONS just so we can buy the latest piece of sh!t that'll make em more money.

The government? Hell, mentioning that SUVs are a bad thing to buy (which they absolutely are) is political suicide.

The status quo has far too much clout in America. We will never volunartarily reduce our standard of living. Nature will have to do that for us.
 
Originally posted by: KenSr
Big business is way to greedy, and the need to pay their FAIR share of taxes as well.
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i think a corporate income tax is a horrible idea.

what should be done is just make investment returns subject to the normal income tax marginal rates. with such a system there is no double taxation (the biggest reason why capital gains have a lower rate than other things), things that weren't taxed twice are now taxed all the way (when you sell a share that money wasn't taxed as part of corporate income, and you're not paying anything more than capital gains), and chances are that corporations are harder to hit with a tax than individuals (when a corp has a tax levied on it, some is really just paid by shareholders, some by workers in the form of lower wages, some by consumers in the form of higher prices, etc).
 
Originally posted by: KenSr
Big business is way to greedy, and the need to pay their FAIR share of taxes as well.
Click to expand...

They have to be greedy, otherwise they are out-competeted by other companies. This is the fault of capatalism. It sets up an infinite growth cycle (more and more money otherwise you lose) and in a finite world, this simply can not fly.
 
What do you mean exactly by outsourcing? If you mean direct company hires, than the US is actually a net importer of foreign jobs. But if you consider all trade, the US is easily a net exporter of jobs (as are all developed nations). Just look at the trade deficit with China alone. $14.9 billion for the last month. Chinese workers make $2-$4 a day and work 6 days a week. That works out to 177 million Chinese employed making US products last month. 177 million people is more than all the workers in the US (60% * 280Million). And this calculation only considers 1 trading partner and only the trade deficit, not all trade.
 
Capitalism will always fail because humans are inherantly greedy and coruptable.
Communism will always fail because humans are inherantly lazy and coruptable.
 
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