Software Tariffs and US IT Outsourcing?

Posted by Cliff on Friday March 28, 2003 @11:30AM from the when-your-job-flees-to-another-country dept.

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?"

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[OT] slashdot problem? by vvikram · 2003-03-28 19:08 · Score: 0, Offtopic

i was puzzled to see slashdot have two stories for which no comments were present for quite sometime. one of them i remember was "windows xp patch slowing things down" or some such. anyway after sometime i happened to flush the cache and i come to slashdot again, i dont see those stories. whats up ? i am NOT a subscriber......but then how did i get to see the stories ? or am i making a mistake ? if so please correct me. thanks.

vv