Slashdot Mirror
Growth in Indian Offshoring Slowing
quantumstream writes "CNN/Money is reporting that high wages are causing some software companies to look to other countries for outsourcing, including Eastern Europe and several other SE Asian countries. Gartner Research believes a drop of 45% in India's share could happen in the next two years. Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?"
In a global economy, there will always be someone able/willing to do it for less money. Eventually those who were the go-to people are undercut. And then the undercutters are undercut. And it so on, and so forth. Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere.
When price is no longer the main factor determining where to outsource a project to, the focus will shift back to quality, maintainability, and so forth. Indeed, it is quite possible that the future software industry will appear very similar to that of today's automotive industry in terms of multinational competition.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Who cares? The key here is the companies are still looking at OFFSHORE outsourcing. Doesn't matter from the U.S. "Average Joe" standpoint what country it ends up in. It's still "somewhere else".
disclaimer: I work in the outsource call center industry. Although I am not fully opposed to offshore outsourcing... it's disheartening to see people you know getting laid off so that their job can be sent overseas for cheap labor.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Let's see, we need a place where people speak English, there is a significant number of people who know something about computers, and the wages are even lower than in India.
Given the plethora of 419 e-mails that evade my spam filter, how about Nigeria?
Quality of life standards are improving, driving up labor rates, and most of the "easy" outsourcing has already been done. Outsourcing larger development projects ends up not saving as much as expected because of the added management layers that are needed here and there to ensure a successful project.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
What's more important is that these increases so far have not been passed on to clients in the U.S.
Well duh, after all we never saw the drop in prices thanks to switching from hiring people for $1000 a month to $120 a month. I'm sure they won't raise prices until they hit $500/mo.
a number of business sites are saying Latin America is the new India for outsourcing. They have similar timezones to U.S., speak English, and are even a relatvely short plane trip away. Who knows, might be a more attractive spot to immigrate to than south asia too, for those willing to follow the work
Folks..
Lets not kid ourselves here, the poor developers in India are exploited. The average salary is around $390/month, the kids down at the local fast food joint here in the US make more money than that. Sure the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books, computers etc, still cost the same or more than they do here.
I've worked with several out-sourced Indian teams, and to be honest... you get what you pay for. Just like everywhere else, they have good programmers and bad programmers. Unfortunately, the nice people in India have a tendency to what to "please" you, so instead of giving you accurate, clear-cut information, they tend to tell you what you want to hear.
They also have very little motivation, unless they are working for a big company like IBM, which has a reputation for a solid career, most developers aren't going to pull the allnighter or get the job done to meet the deadline.
Out of about 30 code reviews I've done for Indian teams in the past month, I would say I've turned them all back for one coding mistake, bad design, or flat out not fixing the problem. The quality is poor.
I've also spent time building teams in India, and its been pretty much hit and miss. Some teams do great work and are very successful, other teams spend their time trying to negotiate to do less work and have longer times to complete projects, to the point where we've just dropped Indian teams and finished the work ourselves.
Outsourcing costs more than its worth, better off hiring some students and getting two or three good developers vs. 20 bad ones in a different time zone.
People want something for nothing, and are willing to enslave others, then justify it to themselves because they're "saving" these people from poverty.
Only one place those goddamn cost cuts are going. Into the CEO's pocket.
We need to cap CEO salaries to something like 4 times what their best people on the ground earn. Don't think it can work? Check out Korea's ship building industry.
Capitalism and a "free" market are all well and good but it's not a perfect system and there do need to be controls.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It's not ironic. It's economics.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I was just getting good at understanding the Indian accent when I was calling Tech Support!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
it occurs to me that it was "trendy" to outsource to India (and managers basically fabricating lies about how much money was saved and how quality was maintained), will it be "trendy" to move outsourcing *from* India? The U.S.of A provides the lion's share of India's outsourcing income and I could see a cascading collapse of major portions of the economy over there ...
"India raked in more than $2 billion of an estimated $3 billion global ... market."
"the worldwide offshore BPO market will grow to about $24 billion by 2007 of which India will earn about $13.8 billion."
So with massive market growth India might slip below 50% market share if they don't watch their back.
But it's not like they're stocking up on pink slips in Bangalore.
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
When they say "Southeast Asia," are they talking about Vietnam? I can't think of anywhere else where they have a large residue of English speakers.
The Philippines - not a residue, but native speakers along with Filipino(Tagalog).
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Are they also taking into account changes in exchange rates when they are calculating the dollar cost? The figures stated look like they are basing the dollar cost in todays dollars(since the ratios stay about the same), but could it be that 6,000 ruppees buys more dollars now than it did 4 years ago?
Monstar L
Canadian wood? I wish. The tariffs on Canadian lumber are massive. This is a blatant transfer of money from the American home owner (who has to pay more for lumber) to the American forestry industry. It's a fine example of hurting the many for the good of the few, and why trade restrictions both suck and blow.
1. Some "consulting firm" is involved in a study instead of some non-profit organization.
2. When that firm is Gartner, who've been known to make all kinds of outrageous claims to get publicity.
3. They come up with nice, easy numbers like "Gartner Research believes a drop of 45% in India's share could happen in the next two years." Anyone who've done any research or studies, knows that numbers ending in 5 or 0 don't have special meanings in reality. The only thing that it matters to are readers, especially PHBs. What this suggests is that Gartner just pulled some number out of a hand to get more publicity, again. 45% is much easier for a PHB to rattle off than 73% during a meeting.
I have no strong feelings about this "news" either especially coming from a source as unreliable as Gartner. The trend is probably true but the number is probably bogus.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Well, the irony of Canadian wood is that you Yankees want it, but you just don't want to pay much for it. And now you're flouting a treaty and keeping an ill-gotten $5 billion. Other countries in negotiations with the US over free trade agreements pay heed. American politicians are corrupt servants of industries too incompetent to compete.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Not sure about the rest of your comment, but it sounds mostly like anecdotal evidence and opinions tend to be subjective. I disagree with this particular excerpt from your comment, though.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying/dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is plain ridiculous. To sum it up for you, PPP is used because:
The PPP measures how much a currency can buy in terms of an international measure (usually dollars), since goods and services have different prices in some countries than in others.
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India than they do in the US. For example, a loaf of bread costs about Rs. 10-20 (about 0.25 - 0.50 USD). Monthly rental for a pretty spacious house would approximate to Rs. 10000 (about $250). Those are rough figures, and will differ by region, but a single software engineer (for comparison purposes, since I'm single too) could live *comfortably* in a metro city like Bangalore for about Rs 15000 (including food/rent/groceries/booze/other_expenses). That works out to about 50% of his average salary of about Rs. 30000. Ofcourse when you convert his salary to USD, it comes to only about $750, (which wouldn't even cover the monthly rent in most areas in the US) and causes you to gasp, go hyper and claim "OMG, they're exploiting software engineers" or "OMG they're stealing our jaabs by working for less".
In the end, the major cost saving for companies is *not* the lower salary (as you claim fast food workers in the US get), but about the *Exchange Rate*. Poorer economies have a lower cost of living than more developed counterparts, and hence have a weaker currency against the US Dollar. This multiplication/division factor allows companies to earn in USDollars and pay in Rupees (or any other weaker currency) thus widening their profit margin. So please ponder over these finer points before spreading FUD/incorrect information and basing other (consequently erroneous) axioms on an incorrect assumption. Thank you.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Offering someone a job, even at what you consider to be a crappy wage, isn't enslavement.
So if you say "here do this work, otherwise you'll end up poor and starving" isn't enslavement? It isn't far from it if you ask me. The only decent option is to ask someone else for a job, but if everyone in a position of power is offering the same conditions, guess what you're back to the same conditions: work for me or die.
At the very least this is servitude. You do get some choice in who gets to be your master.but honestly I don't think it's that far off enslavement.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've been working on a little theory that the whole outsourcing phenomena is reflective of a much deeper economic problem that's been developing in the U.S. over the last 20+ years.
The last great bout with price-inflation in the U.S. was in the late 1970's, after Nixon cut the dollar's theoretical gold-peg (theoretical, because only foreigners could redeem dollars for gold), and while the economy was absorbing all of the dollars that'd been "printed" to pay for the Vietnam war.
Paul A. Volcker, chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1979->1987, solved the Inflationary crisis of the early 1980's by hiking interest rates to obscenely high levels. His entry in the wikipedia says that inflation was reduced from 9% in 1980 to 3.5% in 1982. The cure wasn't easy, however, as it induced a recession and much joblessness. It was thought that Reagan was going to be a one-termer.
Anyways, today is like the 1970's all over again. We've had tons of newly printed money spewing out of the government since about 1995. First it fueled the dot-com bubble. The government opened the money-faucet even wider after 9/11. The effect of having more money in the economy is that prices go up for scarce items with high demand. Hence we have home prices that seems to grow without end, and the price of oil going through the roof.
The difference between the 2000's and the 1970's is that Giant Corporations seem to think they have a way out of paying American workers the increased wages price inflation forces them to demand: outsourcing.
Remember Little Boy George's hundred-billion $ economic stimulus package that got passed soon after 9/11? In decades past, Americans (er, USians) would've taken the money and gone out and bought products built buy other Americans (USians). Those producers would take their profits from all the sales and use them to invent new things to sale, and new American factories to build them in. Closed circuit, stimulus gets recycled in the economy over and over again.
In the new system, Americans take their economic stimulus to go out and buy stuff "made in china" And profits from that sale allows chinese entrepreneurs to go and build a new factory in China. Open circuit. So Georgie Boy's stimulus package went around once.
There's nothing wrong with trade, so long as it's a two-way street. But at least in the last 4 years, Americans have been buying goods from China, and the chinese have been lending the dollars they've made in the sale back to us, to pay for our illustrious leader's silly little jihad against self-induced terrorism (See Harry Browne's When Will We Learn [part 2], and his other 2001 articles for what I think is a lucid explanation of how the U.S.'s foreign policy has lead to the problems we face today).
Getting back to the subject at hand: the primary problem is not that there's a trade imbalance, but that the Federal Reserve's willy-nilly printing of money allows the imbalance to grow much much larger than it ever could otherwise. In hard-money times, if China accumulated an excess of dollars, those dollars would become worth less in world trade. Chinese products would become more expensive for Americans to buy, and American products would become cheaper for the Chinese.
But as it has been, the Chinese pegged their currency to the dollar (hence, no relative adjustment in the value of the two currencies), and that was just fine for Georgie, 'cause the chinese bought plenty of U.S. bonds to pay for his silly little war.
I think i'm rambling now, so I'll quit soon. My main point is that Giant Corporations are outsourcing today to hide rampant 1970's-style inflation from their customers.
Outsourcing is also done to prevent the natural "leveling of the playing field." In a closed-circuit economy, if no one want
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I think it is because the products are cheaper. Costs have come down and continue to come down. Dell is all about economy in large scale. Look at memory prices for an example, they have dropped like a rock and there is very little manufactor support required for them so the savings was not from cutting support costs.
Getting off topic here to your post but along the lines of the article.
I personally think the bottom level support systems of any large company are completely useless. They might as well have no support structure at the lower tiers. They would serve the customer at the same level and not have to pay for something that is useless.
A recent example with HP.
To start off. I had a dead IP Console switch (16 port IP KVM). It was completely dead and the power led was not even on. When I finally got to the right department, the first level tech refused to acknowledge there was no power. He wanted me to upgrade the firmware and call back. I repeated that the device does not even power up at all, no fan, no power led and it is impossible to upgrade the firmware. He asked what firmware was currently on the device. When I said I did not know has asked me to connect a server to it, power it on and read the firmware to him from some menu after the device was done booting. I repeated that it does not power on at all. He finally understood after I described what the product actually does and what it was for, hello, it is a KVM and it is DEAD. Okay, new one on the way...
HP like many other companies has a system in place to send you emails about the status of existing open support tickets. I recieved one about the replacement KVM I was to recieve but it was noted to be on backorder. In the email I was given a link to inquire about the new shipping date. The link took me to the HP self serve web site. I filled out the form with all of the case information and asked when my part was going to be shipped. The result of the web request was another email asking me to call the 800 number to inquire about my shipping date. What the hell was the purpose of that exercise? I called the number (1800-HPINVEN(T)), and the voice system had absolutely no options for IP Console Switch, KVM or anything I could possible use to describe the product. It said I could use "OTHER" but it only actually understood the word "OTHER" after saying it at least 5 different times. I was transferred to bottom level support to describe my problem. I supplied the case number and the person asked what product I was talking about. I asked her to pull up the case number and see. She does not have access to case numbers so I had to describe to her what the product was. She had no options for IP Console switch or KVM and I finally asked for the server group. Finally, after 12 minutes I was at level 2 in the server side, an english speaking person (unknown location but at least sounded like he was a native english speaker with a southern accent). Regardless of where he was, he pulled up the case number, knew what the product was, had some in stock and I recieved the new one via overnight morning delivery.
I know everyone has their own tech support nightmare stories but my point with this one is why even have a tier one or general support line at all? More often then not, it is 100% completely useless and gets you nothing. I guess the status quo keeps them there but they could save even more money getting rid of them entirely.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I visited Bangalore a couple of years ago, and talked to a bunch of people in the IT industry there. They were already starting to realize that the outsourcing business is, basically, working for wages.
The real money is in developing a property income. Look for a wave of Indian software products, developed from their own designs. A couple of years later, look for the same thing from China.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. "Voodoo" economics.
Dude,
I don't mean to be harsh here, but a job is not property. It's an exchange of your labor for money, and if your customer can get the work done cheaper, he's entitled to do so. Bottom line: it's his money, not yours.
That being said, I took a look at monster.com and found over 1K hits for "tech support". If that's what you want to do, there are lots of places looking for support people. They may not be in your town, they may not be at the wage you used to get, whatever, but nobody *owes* you anything that they haven't committed to in a contract.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Well if anything, it makes things even more expensive (for India) because 4 years ago, it was about 49 rupees to the dollar. Now it's about 43 rupees. The more you outsource, the more the excahnge rates rise, the less revenue Indian outsourcing companies get, the less lucrative outsourcing becomes, yada yada and yada.
As an Indian working in India, I've been screaming myself hoarse about this, and how America really doesn't have much to fear from outsourcing - because wages/costs/value of rupee is rising a lot faster than jobs/wages are falling in America. So eventually, say within the next 5 years, it won't be worth it to outsource to India. Now some people think that it just means things will be outsource to China or Kazakhstan or Sudan..but no.
1) China's GDP per capita is already much higher than India's. This means (in very inaccurate, general terms) that a chinese worker is ALREADY more expensive than an Indian one - coupled with a MUCH higher exchange rate - so the work will NOT be shipped to China.
2) It won't be sudan or wherever because India's main advantage is ENGLISH population. Sure they're not speaking as perfect as an American (debatable point actually), but there are more people speaking English in India, than in China, or the Philipines or wherever - in fact the World's largest selling English Daily is published in India - the Times of India (I'm not including a link to it because the f-ing site is bloated with spyware, and one of you poor souls might actually still be using IE!). There's that and the fact that India is 10-12 hours ahead of a US time zones. This is one reason for the efficiency - providing 24 hour customer service to Americans is easy if for 12 of those hours, your customer reps are actually just doing a regular 9-to-6 in their own country.
So again, there some particularly unique factors as to why India has been successful. Once our economy picks up, outsourcing on the *relatively* large scale will slow, or even drop greatly. Plus, in those 5 years, America will also move on in different ways (incomes won't rise or may even drop, yyou guys will find some alternative "growth" industry to keep you going, allowing retrenchment of unemployed software engineers/call centre workers, e.t.c).
My Favourite Meme
The issue here in software programming which is skilled labor as opposed to who has the fanciest manufacturing plant.
It's a fallacy that electronic hardware manufacturing does not require skilled labor. Sure the people running the machines don't require alot of skill. But essentially they are the equivalent of call center people. Those factories also need:
Technicians - Maintain equipment
Mechanical Engineers/ChemE/MatSci/EE - develop machine processes, techical documentation, troubleshoot complex problems
Industrial engineers - layouts, material flows, production improvements
Business educated people - manage supply lines
Other college educated - managerial, training, quality,etc.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Oh yeah, speaking about their English accent which probably might be their third or fouth language, how many languages can you speak without accent? Stop looking down at the third world countries. You are not any better....
Okay, I have to address this one. I have quite a bit of experience with Indians and their somewhat limited mastery of spoken English, both from tech support as well as a TA I had at an American university.
First, I'll say this: often their grammar is superior to the average American's. I have no doubt their written English would exceed that of many American's. And I fully understand that English is probably not their primary language. You ask how many languages I speak without accent. Just one...English. I can speak broken Spanish with what I would assume is a horrendous accent. But do you want to know something important? I do not try to offer technical support to Spanish speakers, or try to teach at a Latin American university.
To be fair, most English-speaking Indians speak much better English than I do Spanish, so the comparison is not absolutely fair. But if I cannot understand them, the effect is the same. I am actually impressed by the number of languages many non-Americans speak. But if you are trying to teach a class at a university in the US, or trying to offer tech support for a US company, and you cannot be understood, you are not accomplishing the job you are being paid to do. This actually bothers me less in the tech-support example, because I can always just call back later and try to get a better representative who I can understand. But in the education example, it is often a choice of staying in the class and hoping you just don't even need any help from the instructor (or ever need to understand what they are asking/telling you), or dropping it and hoping you can pick it up later. And hoping that you aren't in the same boat later. And you're paying a lot more for those credits than you are for tech support.
And it isn't necessarily racism. I've had a white European (German, specifically) TA I could barely understand as well. And if companies switch to Eastern European call centers, the problem will likely be the same. I cannot tell the color of your skin over the phone. But I CAN tell if I can understand you.
And yes, if I went to a street in Bangalore and rounded up 10 guys, I'm sure 9 of them would be smarter than our president. Hell, one or two might even be more effective speakers (in English) than our president (ever heard the guy talk?) Most of us are not trying to say than Indians, or anybody else from the countries being outsourced to, are stupid. Just that their English is damn near incomprehensible.
I'm in an MNC operating out of India. Being part of the workforce, I know pretty well the wretched condition Indian coders work in. Our training is inadequate, faculty is of poor quality, resources are lacking and we are always in a hurry. No wonder India has never produced a world renowned software product. At this rate, it never will.
So if you say "here do this work, otherwise you'll end up poor and starving" isn't enslavement?
Enslavement is when a person is owned by an other, and can be bought and sold as property, as well as raped, tortured or killed at will, just as you would be free to destroy any other property.
By contrast, offering someone a job is at worst pointless. If the prospective employee doesn't find the offer better than his current situation, he can always decline it. At best it can improve someone's life immensly. At the utter level of poverty many third worlders live in, a few cents more a day can be the difference between life and death.
Have you bloody BEEN to Japan recently? Because I think you're overlooking a hell of a lot of things about the Japanese culture and economy. Here's a few:
1. Most cheap goods in Japan are produced in China or Korea nowadays, and most lower-level work is done by Korean and Chinese immigrants who don't have citizenship, even though their families have been there for generations. These people have been moving up in the economic food chain, but lack the solid ties to Japanese society that citizenship would help bring.
2. Japanese secondary schools are rapidly going to shit; teachers get assaulted, students don't pay any attention, and other than the entrance exams, the material covered is not terribly difficult. Japan needs a major dose of education reform.
3. Japanese workers used to have employment for life in the 80s; now, the only lifetime workers are government employees. This has caused mounds of social problems, doubly so because everything in Japanese society is based on seniority.
4. Better educated and more competent? Japanese work twelve-hour days, getting eight hours of work done, because their culture demands it, and afterwards, those Tokyo salarymen go out and drink and smoke as if cancer and liver failure were going out of style. Even if a younger employee has good ideas, they are overlooked because of their age, and the amount of pure ass-kissing that happens is beyond belief. How would you like it if you *had* to go to your boss' house and fix his bratty son's computer, for no pay, and you can sleep on the couch because the trains stop running at eleven.
Don't get me wrong. Japan's not a horrible place, but it's no paradise either. Their big advantage over the U.S. is that the younger generation is disgusted by most of the things I've listed, and fortunately, Japanese education is still very science-centric (unlike the American school system). So Japan stands a better chance of reinventing themselves; but make no mistake, they are not in a happy position right now.
Apologies about my English, as got back from Japan a few weeks ago, and I'm still not quite adapted to being home.
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Is this the beginning of the end of the dominance of India in the tech offshoring market?
No- it's the beginning of the "poverty as a comparitive advantage" economic model. Just like we've been predicting for years.
These corporations were getting high off of the fact that they had an easy way to undermine American labor and trade standards- India was the perfect "fertile ground" for that; They had the education system of a developed nation (skilled workers), but the labor standards of a third-world nation. Now that they are actually establishing some standards for themselves, they are losing their "poverty advantage".
Welcome to the new World Economy- a "round robin" game where your nation wins when your standards of living have eroded to a point less than everyone else's; and you lose as soon as you try to start making them better.
If the goal of the country is to increase next year's GDP at all costs, then listen to the economists.
... None of these figures puts any red ink to a balance sheet, so why should the economists care? Their job is to serve the holy God of The Market.
Not all economists view max GDP as their goal. Some, and increasingly more, attempt to minimize the GINI coefficient (which also tends to maximize GDP as a secondary effect).
The externalized expenses of increased unemployment numbers (the real unemployment numbers, not the crap the Labor Dept. puts out), stagnant wages, and increased costs of living have been largely absorbed by increased reliance on credit (thanks in part to the housing bubble).
And economists have been warning about this for quite some time. What you failed to mention is our increasing trade imbalance. That's the biggest threat to our long run economy. As far as the housing bubble, read some economic journals for some positions on that. Reading economics as interpreted by the popular press/media tends to simplify positions to the point where it looks like economists think all of this is OK. In reality, it's the exact opposite.
have been largely absorbed by increased reliance on credit.
Economists have been concerned with the low American savings rate for decades. That does have far reaching negative impacts on the market, as does increased utilization of credit (read about the money multiplier and inflation). Even if the goal of every economist was to worship the market, as you put it, the points you've made and suggested that economists have ignored are entirely opposite of the truth. They're all valid concerns of every competent economist out there.
I have a feeling that when China decides to stop subsidizing us, we'll find out that our economy (and country) has been bankrupt for years.
This is an excellent point and I'm glad you brought it up. This is something most economists are very concerned about. The growing trade gap is everyone's concern, from Greenspan to Buffett, and seemingly to everyone BUT the current administration. I'm a republican (the true fiscally conservative kind, not the kind we have in office now. neoconservatism = liberal spending, oppressive social agenda), and I happen to be appalled by all of this. Fiscal responsibility should be the #1 concern of every administration, because that DOES trickle down in a sense. Want to keep the middle class afloat? Howbout not doing things that will raise inflation. The rich can take the hit, the middle and lower class sure can't. The first concern is the trade gap.
Anyway, I hope I was able to clear a few things up there. I have a degree in economics and a job as a programmer, I'm middle class, republican, and absolutely pissed off at the current state of affairs. Such a combination DOES exist, you know. Not all of us are concerned with the party line or pretending everything's OK because "our guys" are in office. I really hope a candidate runs in '08 who really has a handle on this, or at least the right advisors, because the last election gave us two candidates who were economically clueless, if not absolute liars. Whether your choice was "The economy couldn't be in better long term shape" Bush or "We can afford socialized healthcare" Kerry, the outlook for that 4 year term were awful. The problem is, none of these older-than-dirt politicians seem to understand the workings of a global economy because it didn't quite exist the way it does now for the majority of their lives.