Slashdot Mirror
Obama Says Offshoring Fears Are Unwarranted
alphadogg writes "The perception that Indian call centers and back office operations cost US jobs is an old stereotype that ignores today's reality that two-way trade between the US and India is helping create jobs and raise the standard of living in both countries, US President Barack Obama told a gathering of business executives in Mumbai on Saturday. President Obama's remarks come after some moves in the US that had Indian outsourcers worried that the US may get protectionist in the wake of job losses in the country. The state of Ohio, for example, banned earlier this year the expenditure of public funds for offshore purposes. US exports to India have quadrupled in recent years, and currently support tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs in the US, he said in a speech that was also streamed live. In addition, there are jobs supported by exports to India of agriculture products, travel and education services. President Obama, who is in India on a three-day visit, said that more than 20 deals worth about $10 billion were announced on the first day of his visit."
The H1-b fraud is what kills it for most Americans that stumble upon offshoring's negative qualities.
You don't go to India for US jobs, especially when you're millions of US jobs in the hole.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
I am a software developer and I was hired for my current job to bring back all development from India. I was tasked with bringing all development back in-house because the offshore projects were behind schedule and suspect quality, not to mention the communication issues.
What we do now is do a combination of in-house development and rural sourcing, which is hiring U.S. developers in the midwest and midsouth in areas of lower cost of living. They are more expensive than offshore developers, but much cheaper than developers in major cities and these rural developers are in the same timezone.
I think you will see more and more rural sourcing cutting in to the offshoring of jobs. I don't think there will ever be a full reversal of offshoring jobs, just that rural sourcing will become more and more viable and desirable.
"Create job abd raise the standard of living in both countries".
This statement is only true if you count the rich getting richer in the US. I fail to see how losing your middle class income job to outsourcing raises your stadard of living.
If I live in a more developed country, why the fuck should I tolerate this? Being a sovereign nation means having the ability to regulate trade up to and including stopping it completely. Since, as you freely admit, foreign trade is utterly screwing us over, that sounds like a pretty good idea right now.
It's ironic that people like you voice dissent at the Indian off shoring situation when you had no problem off shoring our manufacturing jobs to China by lining up at Walmart's feeding trough.
What he said about India could have well applied to China more, as the US exports more products to China than to India. But he, and the other politicians, did not say the same things to China. The only reason being that China is now the main competitor and so we have to demonize it and please countries like India and Vietnam, exactly like how we pleased China 30 years ago -- opened up our market without asked for the equivalent level of opening up, established relation with Mao's regime which was a million times more suppressive than the current one, and kicked out Taiwan from th UN, in order to fight against the then biggest competitor -- the Soviet Union. The problem with this strategy is that while we may constraint one competitor, we are creating another new major one for ourselves down the road. And we the common people pay the costs. History repeats itself again and again.
The US trade deficit with India is already over $7B this year through August; heading to top $10B this year. That will be among the highest annual deficits, though Bush/Cheney got deficits as high as $12B+. August 2009 saw the only monthly trade surplus with India in well over 20 years, $34 million; the rest of the months total to something like a quarter $TRILLION more spent on India than India spent on the US. It's obvious that the parallel growth in the US and India leaves the US with less money from our jobs and more money in India for its jobs.
Of course, the corporate profits on all those jobs are not counted in trade stats. The real competition isn't between US labor vs Indian labor. It's between labor in either country, and the corporate owners who run the system, keeping the profits among themselves and their banker partners.
--
make install -not war
It's a disaster, it's always been a disaster. Managers get their bonus based on cost savings regardless of how much it wrecks their company in the mid-long term.
And Toyota and Honda assemble cars in the U.S. Sometimes you just gotta do stuff locally.
You lost me at "tax and spend". We should get past bumper-sticker assertions, especially when they're not even right. I guess "tax less but spend more" isn't as catchy, but it seems to work for the Republicans.
My comments are my own, and do not represent the views of my employer, my spouse, my children, or my cats.
The rest of the world is evolving rapidly into highly educated, highly industrialized, highly technological countries that resemble the west - in certain parts and certain ways, anyway. The more similar their productivity is, the more similar standards of living they can demand but for a long time a series of favorable conditions and network effects have kept the US in a solid lead. The balance is shifting, but to say that it actually flows from one country to the other is fairly misleading. You could halt trade but it wouldn't halt these countries from modernizing, and they would also retaliate.
The US currently has a very negative trade balance, meaning it imports far more than it exports. If it were to close the borders, the US would hurt the most. Medium to long term that could mean opportunity for domestic industry, but the short term would be a substantial drop in the standard of living as many goods become expensive or even unavailable. There was a time when a trade boycott with the US would be dire but today if you can maintain trade with the EU, Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Russia and so on most countries would do fine. Alternate suppliers of almost everything now exist outside the US.
In short, the US is no longer in a position where they would have anything to gain from going protectionist. They'd be their own little isolated market of 300 million people while the world market - even subtracting the billions that are too poor to really participate - is much larger and would simply outpace the US. That's the nastier parts of the free market, once you've let it loose you might in the end become the victim of it, having to adjust your wages and standard of living to fight for jobs just like everyone else. But if there's one country that has no right to complain, it would be the US...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Solution: Why not raise our import tariff rates to match that of our so-called trading partners?
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
He is what he is, another tax-and-spend Democrat with delusions of grandeur like all the rest of the Washington crowd, and we're getting precisely the leadership for which we cast our votes. I did my research, and had a pretty good idea how he was going to turn out, and alas, I was not wrong.
You sure did your research. For the past 30 years every Republican president has increased the debt while every Democrat has decreased it. Damn those tax and spending Democrats and their lowering of the national debt. Here's a clue: stop repeating unfounded talking points.
Explain to me the effective differences in terms of actual fiscal policy between modern Democrats and Republicans.
When the GOP demonizes "tax and spend" as the other party's problem, they mean "spend on domestic social programs" and deliberately exclude US military spending. I think that's a pretty accurate summary, actually.
When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day, that has lasted 8 years, and provided no way to pay for it. That is a more egregious "tax and spend" program than any social program the Dems have initiated, "Obamacare" included.
If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too. I expect that if they fail to produce an actual budget like that, they will again be voted out in 2012.
OTOH, if they do produce such a budget, Christ, I'll vote for them myself.
--
$tar -xvf
You lost me at "tax and spend". We should get past bumper-sticker assertions, especially when they're not even right. I guess "tax less but spend more" isn't as catchy, but it seems to work for the Republicans.
Fine. How about "borrow and spend"? Because that's what he's doing. Is that an improvement over "tax and spend"? The reality is he's doing both.
"He" who? George Bush? George H. W. Bush? Ronald Reagan? Each of these Presidents tripled, doubled, and quadrupled the national debt while in office, and each pretended to run on a platform of fiscal responsibility. The only one who hasn't in the past thirty years is Clinton and, to be fair, that really only happened because he got lucky with the economy.
Right now Obama is running up the debt because that's what you do in a recession. Now, will he turn around in two years or so and put the brakes on spending? Maybe he'll try, but I doubt the "fiscally responsible" Republicans will let him, unless the Tea Partiers break ranks and actually let taxes rise and spending fall like they were elected to.
No it doesn't but your worry DOES show the real problem the US has.
There is some believe working in the US that makes it value to top. The interesting jobs, the well paying jobs. But that is not what the economy, the boring local economy, runs on. It runs on truck drivers, factory workers, construction, repair. This is what keeps that majority of the population employed. Silicon Valley, Redmon, Wall Street do not.
Obama, and he is hardly the first, seems so pleased with 10 billion in orders. But how much of that money flows straight back out again because to produce those orders the US needs foreign goods? And those 10 billion are petty cash for the US. Meanwhile far more money is lost with outsourced call centers year in year out.
And no, outsourcing a call center will NOT cost the country a fortune, just a local community. A local community that can't then tax the local salaries and use those taxes to fund local education, local road maintenance etc etc. Outsourcing is not about a cripling injury that instantly kills the economy. This is a slow bleed that isn't stopped.
The call center goes, the local catering van can't break even anymore. The locals find far lower paying jobs and make ends meet by buying cheap Chinese imports instead of higher quality American goods. More and more American business got to cut costs to be able to meet the lower prices. They do so by outsourcing production to China and yet more Americans have just a bit less to spend.
It ain't complex to see, but if you believe in Wall Street as a religion then this can't be. This is not how the market, the magic fairy market, is supposed to work. Obama, and democrats and republicans with him, is saying "let them eat cake". The famous saying that started the revolution showing that the ruling elite didn't have a clue about what was really happening. It is after all not in Washington or Redmond or Wall Street that the job cuts are hurting the most. Oh, they might have a bad year, but not decade after decade in which a factory town turns into a ghost town. How many of the powers that be come from Detroit?
Yet the simple people, like the poster above think H1-b is the issue. Yeah right. The US has 300+ million citizens, and how many immigrants on these things? They are irrelevant. This is just the Redmond, Silicon Valley etc job. The get a lot of attention, but they don't keep the heartland working. Producing.
Scream at the immigrant worker while another factory is shipped lock stock and barrel abroad including every single job. SethStorm is like a frenchmen who reacts to "let them eat cake" with: "But I don't like cake."
But you don't have bread let alone cake.
IT has done this a lot. Thinking that they would be save from the export of jobs and then it turned out those dirty filthy foreigners could not just knock out cheap goods but cheap code. Boohoo, now our jobs are going...
Well, you didn't protest when every item in Walmart came from China, who is now supposed to care the next version of Windows comes from China?
And don't you worry, the decline will be so slow and the average American so attached to his large house and larger car that he will bend over backwards to keep up with payments rather then protest. Because if you strike or protest, you miss a payment and then that SUV is gone.
American citizens have managed to enslave themselves to Wall Street thoroughly. Willing slaves with guns. If you wrote this down in a book of fiction, nobody would believe it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just where in India, China or Russia are you finding folks who can do Fourier-domain image processing on hardware microarchitecture? I could use a few, and don't much care if they're American, Chinese, Indian, Russian, or beings from Aldebaran IV with green and purple feathers. Incidentally, I don't think that people like that are getting any rarer: we've always been few and far between. But the code monkeys are getting commoner, and the slushpile of CV's gets bigger and bigger with only the same few really promising candidates buried under all the others. (Summary: I'm an American, MSEE/PhDCS, and *can* do all the things you mention. I'm also, uhm, on the high side of fifty, quite expensive, and not in the market at the moment because I've had no trouble finding customers.