Obamer's job billFollow

You have no idea what "false dilemma" means, don't you? I'm working off the assumptions that jobs outsourced overseas are jobs lost in the US. This is true. This is, in fact, the very definition of "outsourced".

The rest of your standard playbook whining fails to address this. Employment in the manufacturing sector collapsed under Bush and the GOP -- remember outsourcing being a major debate theme in the 2004 Bush/Kerry election? Remember the GOP rank-and-file saying "Oh no, we're just going to make NEW jobs! More sophisticated jobs that won't go away!"

Instead we had lowered household income as people lost their jobs and took low level service positions bolstered by the money movement of the housing bubble. Then that popped and...

...well, to say the GOP was lying in 2004 would be an understatement. But your little "false dilemma!" works too.

Technically, that's called "offshored". "Outsourced" simply means to hire an outside company to do work you used to do internally. Outsourced is actually the exact wrong term to use if you're trying to blame a company for hiring people in India instead of the US.

The point is that even ignoring that difference, the word "outsourced" is misused a hell of a lot and presumably was also misused in the Atlantic article mentioned earlier in this thread which prompted this particular series of posts. Many journalists (and the analysts they get their data from as well!) tend to simply count every single job in a given sector created outside the US by a US company as a job that was "outsourced". But as a couple of us have been trying to explain, in many cases these are jobs that would not have been created in the US anyway.

Were some of them offshored? Sure. Were all of them? No. Were even a majority of them? Probably not.



And in the tech field (which the article and responding posts were about) jobs have dramatically increased during the time frame in question. We were talking about tech jobs, you injected your little bit about factory jobs. Do you see how that's not really relevant? I'll also point out an amusing bit about how liberals focus selectively on indicators while missing the bigger picture. Liberals obsess over "outsourced" tech jobs in India, while failing to recognize that the total number of tech jobs in the US has increased over the period of time in question. Meanwhile, they also obsess over figures on "jobs created or saved" during the Obama administration, while failing to note that on total we lost jobs. It's kinda amusing if you stop and think about it.

If you want to discuss factory jobs instead, we can do that, but as I already posted, this has a hell of a lot to do with the incredibly unfriendly manufacturing job environment your party has created in the US. Blaming businesses for moving their factories elsewhere after you made it too expensive to operate them here seems kinda ridiculous.



The false dilemma is the idea that we either outsource tech jobs to India *or* provide wonderful factory jobs in the US. Surely you can see how that's a pretty bizarre correlation. One really has nothing at all to do with the other.

Edited, Sep 16th 2011 3:16pm by gbaji

Huh!? Why would it do that? If anything, it affect the decision of a company to spin off foreign parts of its business. If the taxes paid by a company making and importing goods from Mexico are low enough, they might decide it's not worth making their Mexico production division a separate economic entity. And guess what? That will actually increase the amount of tax revenue paid in the US. Funny how that works!



It is one of many factors considered when deciding where to build a factory, or office, or distribution plant, or whatever. Again with the all-or-nothing mentality. You seem to believe that if tax rates aren't the sole factor that they don't matter at all. That's just not true though. Every single thing that affects the profitability of operating a given business in the US will affect the decision to operate it in the US.

And taxes absolutely are part of that. As are a host of other factors. I think the bigger point is that when we look at which political "side" changes those factors in ways that drive away those very manufacturing jobs you're complaining about, it's pretty clear that it's the left doing it. They create the environmental restrictions, labor regulations, health care requirements, and tax rates which all factor into that decision. That's not to say some of those things aren't good ideas. But the trade off is that we've driven away manufacturing. It would at least be honest to acknowledge this instead of trying to blame the businesses for responding to the conditions that were created.


There is a cost to having those things. It just seems bizarre that some want to pretend that there isn't and never take responsibility for those costs. I mean, does anyone honestly think it makes sense to blame businesses for this? Do people honestly believe that we can levy any cost on their business and they should just accept it and keep paying it and never decide to take their business elsewhere? Where does that idea come from? If every time you walked into a store the prices were twice as high as the store down the street and the employees constantly berated you for being there, wouldn't you take your business down the street? Of course you would. And no one would blame you for that.


Why is this different?

It's about increasing profits. To the degree that wages are the significant factor, then it can be about wages. But it can also be about costs of constructing a factory. It can be energy costs to run the factory. It can be import costs for the materials you're going to use in your factory. It can be shipping costs to send materials from your factory to market. And yeah, it can also be the taxes levied on the activity you do in your factory.

There are a whole lot of factors that are involved in that decision. But if you're honest about this, you'll realize that most of the factors that tend to drive manufacturing jobs away from the US are things that liberals have imposed, not conservatives. And before you go there, once again: it's not an all or nothing equation. Some regulations and restrictions and taxes and labor benefits can be borne by an industry. But the more you increase those costs, the more you're going to push certain industries away (like manufacturing).

It's a matter of degrees. It doesn't happen all at once. Manufacturing has been leaving the US for over 30 years. To suggest that this is some new problem that just popped up in the last handful of years and made our economy a mess is pretty ridiculous.

Ya since Reagen started ******* up the economy.

But it did so by repeating the same flawed "all jobs created by US companies overseas are jobs lost domestically" argument. That's what I was pointing out. The article did not support the claim you were making (or did so using a poor premise).



No. I'd say that liberals are more concerned about making it look like we're losing jobs to other nations in order to avoid the larger problems with our job market. We aren't "losing jobs" to India in the tech fields Joph. Those claiming this use the same false statistical analysis methods I mentioned above (assume every job created in another country was lost to the US). But that growth in other areas is just that: Growth in other areas. It does not significantly impact the job market here.



Do you know what's preventing even more growth of tech jobs in the US? Qualified people. I'm serious. The problem is that some people want to protect unskilled or low skilled jobs, while simultaneously making it impossible for those jobs to be competitive here. That's the factory worker that you argue wont be able to shift to an in-demand tech job btw.

What do you think we should do though? That same person will *never* be productive working in a factory in the US either. Not so long as we keep our current set of regulations which make such workplaces incredibly expensive to operate. So you'd rather we spend massive amounts of money subsidizing whole industries to pay the higher costs of doing business which we created just so we can protect workers who can't find other jobs that are more useful and cost effective?

At least "shift them into some sort of tech job" is workable and for those who do find work in those areas, they are productive rather than anti-productive. I'll point out that you haven't provided any sort of alternative solution, much less explained how the Democrats policies will somehow magically save us. We can't just keep using government money to protect industries from competition. It doesn't work in the long run. What it does do, however, is make the labor gap worse.



No. It's not. The difference is that Bush and the GOP have been less willing to spend government money to prop up those failing industries. That's not the same thing. The economic effects have been there and been growing for decades. It's not like manufacturing magically got cheaper in other countries and more expensive in the US just in the last decade Joph. Not that much more.

Can you point to any policies of the Bush administration (other than *not* spending money to protect those jobs) that caused this? It's a natural market force. We will only hurt ourselves by fighting against it. If we want manufacturing jobs to come back to the US, we have to change the things that make manufacturing jobs in the US not cost effective. And subsidies and bailouts are *not* the answer. That's just putting a bandaid over the problem and pushing it onto the next guy.


If the conservative solution to move forward into new jobs is wrong, then what is the right answer? Do you have one? Cause if you don't...

Did you even read the article? You seem to be completely winging it.

Hey now that kind of talk is a slippery slope.

I too have an anecdote to pass off as data!

How long has it been since you floated your resume out there though? Do you think that if you were to lose your job that you would have a hard time finding another similar one (in pay at least)?

Similar in pay? No. I could go back to the marketing firm I left that is three blocks from my house and probably make the same, or more. But I quit that job because the stress levels were too high.

I only make $11 an hour, which is probably gonna go up a buck in a few weeks when I hit my one year anniversary. That's actually a pretty good wage for my area, where thirty percent of the population makes below poverty wages. More importantly, I only work 30 hours a week since I am in grad school, and I spend a significant amount of my time at the office doing absolutely nothing. (Mondays I work all six hours, but Tues-Fri involves a lot of Internet surfing.) My stress levels at this job are very low - I am good at what I do, and my boss knows it.

Hence, someone would have to offer me double that hourly wage to make me leave (since that would likely entail 40 hours a week and high stress levels again), which isn't going to happen in this town until I have my master's degree in my hot little hands.

What kind of work are you doing catwho?

Edited, Sep 19th 2011 11:50pm by Xsarus