Software Tariffs and US IT Outsourcing?

HeelToe asks: "A while back I worked with someone who thought the US should simply impose tariffs on imported products to adjust their price to equalize foreign labor rates to the US minimum wage. I was laid off and my position moved to Canada last year. Since then, I've thought a lot about his ideas, as well as one of our topics of conversation a while back: Why doesn't the US tax the import of software? It seems to me like they should. It's not a "tangible" product (same reason used to deny my co-workers and me NAFTA and Trade Act benefits), but when someone outsources to another country with cheap labor for any other industry, there are usually import tariffs. Why is software different, and how would this change the climate of US IT jobs leaving for other parts of the world if we did tax software imports? I've done some looking on the web, but can find nothing in the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States. I did find this thread from a few months back on informationweek.com's Career Development Forum, but not much else. What does Slashdot think?"

Comments

Re:Depends on the situation

[saider]

Actually, you cant just assemble it here and say "Made in America". Some years ago I worked for a domestic electronics maufacturer. Their label read "Assembled in America from foriegn and domestic parts". When I asked the marketing folks why it wasn't "Made in America", they said it was because we did not have enough domestic components to qualify. All our IC's and discrete components were imported. Only about 10% of the parts were actually made here in the USA.

But all of this is just hearsay.