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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."
My admittedly limited understanding of this is that of course it costs us jobs, because it's very expensive to hire US employees compared to the costs of hiring employees in most other countries in the world. (The transaction costs of all of the employee rights and rules and regulations are massive. It's helpful to live in a society with some of them, but there's a massive cost. Think of how massive and absurd so much of HR is.) So between that and the standard of living, labor is cheaper elsewhere. Which means that companies make more money by producing products or services elsewhere. Which both drives prices of products and services down. This in turn raises the standard of living by making products and services less expensive. But the beneficial effects are spread across the entire economy, while the losses are concentrated and massive to the people who lose their jobs.
Economists say the widespread effects are a net gain. I don't know if I believe them--because I haven't done the math, and I've known a lot of economists who aren't very empirical.
At the same time, our gini coefficient (i.e. the divide between the rich and the poor) is increasing, which is probably a bigger problem.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
The state of Ohio, for example, banned earlier this year the expenditure of public funds for offshore purposes.
One of the many things that was possible with Governor Strickland, and not Head Banker-elect Kasich.
The only shame is that Kasich got elected as Head Banker, instead of the state retaining Governor Strickland. Now we get a Wall Street banker that compares himself to an East Coast thug. By how he's talking to the media, he's not going to step aside; the Head Banker's simply going to exact revenge.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
because no matter what anyone says, india is still rife with corruption and incompetence on a scale completely unheard of in the US. When you're there, immersed in it, you develop certain strategies to deal with it, but for a western company that is used to saying 'built to this spec/design, and at this time' and actually getting something close to it, either from china or other western companies, doing business in india is very frustrating. It's usually preferable to pay more, but actually get what you want, when you want it, and have some way to resolve contract disputes in a reasonable fashion.
Several weeks ago I remember hearing a negro professor on the radio mention that even the black community recognized he was not dramatically different from other politicians on issues of civil rights and bringing our jobs home. Too many put their hope and faith in a man that didn't deserve it.
When Obama got elected, I remember speaking about it to a friend of mine who emigrated to Europe some years ago. People there were ecstatic about Obama being our new President-elect. I asked him why. "Is it because Obama is going to make a wonderful President in their view?" His answer? "No. It's because he isn't George Bush." They were far more rational in their appraisal of Obama than we were.
Obama is an ex-Chicago politician, with all that that implies to anyone who knows that fine city. Expecting him to be some kind of messiah, some kind of prophet ringing in a new era of prosperity for America was just ignorant. 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. That many refused to exercise their power wisely, especially in the Internet Age where everything about everyone is online for the taking, and had literally deluded themselves into believing otherwise in no way affects who and what the man represents.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have a friend who just flew to India for a month to clean up an outsourcing mess for his company. Months behind schedule, 1/2 million over budget... from what he told me folks there had been promoted way above their ability level resulting in really substandard management and unsurprising results.
they deserve jobs India can do for a cheaper price?
The correct figured to determine overall national prosperity is to take the median income (not the average), and divide that by the Gini coefficient.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The H-1Bs seem to me to be more of a distraction. However, I'm biased: I'm a Canadian in the US on an H-1B. But, as an H-1B holder, I know something of the process involved.
There are annual limits on the number of H-1Bs that the US hands out. That number is 65k plus an additional 20k for people with masters degrees. I know in 2008, they got more than double the cap on the first day and instituted a lotter, but in 2009, there were very few applications because of the failing economy. I'm pretty sure that most years, the 20k masters cap is never reached, and I think the 65k in 2009 wasn't reached, either.
Anyway, H-1Bs are good for 3 years, extendable up to an additional 2. This means that the theoretical maximum number of legal H-1Bs in the US at any one time is 5 * 85k = 425k. That's less than 0.2% of the population and seems unlikely to me to significantly affect the unemployment rate.
Another point is that H-1B workers are required, by law, to be paid at least the "prevailing wage" based on their work and geographical location. While this is by no means perfect, it does provide some protection against wage depression.
Am I saying the H-1B program is perfect? God, no. There is a lot of abuse. People apply for H-1Bs on false pretenses, the green card application process is dubious to say the least, and the spouses of H-1B holders cannot work unless they acquire their own visas.
The number I quote can be inflated a little because H-1B holders who are applying for green cards can basically keep their H-1Bs indefinitely until the green card application is fully processed. This process can take years. One simple way to reduce the number of H-1B holders is just to process these applications faster.
Of course, there are lots of green card holders in general who are immigrants and you could argue that people with permanent residence status are taking US jobs. I think that's actually a more defensible position, since there are simply more of them. And there are more undocumented workers than H-1B holders, too. Lots more. Therefore, my point is that while the H-1B program is not perfect and is certainly abused, I am dubious of kneejerk claims that it is this fraud that in any way hurts "most Americans". With millions of jobs being lost every year due to the economy, there simply aren't enough H-1B workers to account for very much of it.
"for I am the great and powerful OB!"
Outsourcing jobs to India means more jobs for better pay at home - just like War creates Peace and Freedom makes Slavery and Ignorance breeds Strength.
Women never really faint, Villains always blink their eyes, Children are the only ones who blush and Life is just to Die.
http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity. Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the Earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain. Back where I come from, we have universities, seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers. And when they come out, they think deep thoughts and with no more brains than you have. But they have one thing you haven't got: a diploma.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If I were IBM top brass, I'd do the same thing exactly.
Why hire and keep people in USA rather than anywhere in Asia, now in India, later in China, the in Mongolia, I don't care?
The USA has stupid income taxes, it has stupid payroll taxes, it has regulations that would force me to overpay the employees. The stupid regulations that would make me responsible for employees' healthcare! All the unions, etc.etc.
Of-course I'd get rid of as many people as possible in the shortest time frame and hire people all over the world where I wouldn't be faced with the same regulations and rules.
That's just pure common sense and pure liquidity.
--
Now, of-course everybody is aware that large corporations have always enjoyed disproportionate access to gov't officials by buying politicians through campaign donations, fundraisers, lobbying, etc. IBM has gained plenty through all of this, so IBM is in a cushy place compared to any new start up that would aim at any part of IBM's business.
But now realize, that while IBM is a massive company, like most companies that are backed by gov't, protected by gov't from any new competition, and at the same time the same rules apply to small start ups, where they are in disproportionate disadvantage to the existing company because to an existing large compnay/monopoly, the rules and regulations are trivial cost of business, since they are established and have solid cash flow.
A start up does not have a cash flow. A start up would have to comply with rules and regulations that would make it impossible for a startup really to take off.
IBM is not even an interesting example of this, if you want to start your own hedge fund, you are screwed. You have to be a millionaire already to be able to pay all the compliance costs for all the new regulations that are constantly coming out.
Bills that force you to collect data about the customers, effectively turning you int an IRS and a CIA agent, an unpaid agent, an agent that has to pay out of his own pocket to set up all the system necessary to keep track of all transactions and report them to IRS and the rest of the gov't.
The Patriot act alone probably made start ups in hedge funding impossible.
--
So honestly, USA is not a country that is conducive to new business and that's exactly what it needs - new business. But it's overloaded with bills and rules and laws and regulations and various expectations and lawsuits, it's just too much red tape.
Obviously it makes much more sense to start a business in Asia.
Today, ironically, China is a much more free place to start your own business and succeed than USA. People used to come to US to be more Free and to try and achieve something because the system was created to allow people to achieve success, now it's nowhere near anything like that. China now is more Free in an economic sense than the US.
Oh oh, and all this inflation, all this money printing, it's not helping at all. Inflation and eventual destruction of USD and US consumer, why start a business in US unless you are masochistic?
You can't handle the truth.
It works the other way too. Ever hear of the Chicken Tax? It annihilated the light truck industry. People like to bitch about how many large trucks and SUVs are on the road (and how fuel inefficient they are), but the reality is your own government is almost entirely responsible for that. Manufacturers (even "domestic" ones who were supposed to benefit from the tax) have to do stupid things like assemble trucks and vans overseas, then partially disassemble it, ship it to the US, and then reassemble it again. Or even weirder stuff like the Ford Transit which has to be shipped to the US with rear seats and rear-windows so it qualifies as a "passenger vehicle". Once here, they rip the rear seats out and junk them so they can turn it back into a cargo van. The reason many Japanese manufacturers built plants in the US in the first place was so they could sell their SUVs without a ridiculous 25% tax hike. Ultimately the chicken tax is the reason why the US light truck industry is utterly emaciated compared to the global light truck market.
I recently joined a company where my position was unfilled for 2 years! So its not like they hired H1B simply because they wanted to reduce costs or any inferior motive. There may be hundreds of open positions for a qualified person spread throughout the country but that doesn't mean that he will be able find it. It takes a lot of effort to find a job that fits your needs. Instead of trying to eliminate H1B how about the invention of a system to match people with their qualifications.
That was not clear. Here's a description. It's pretty despicable how corporations bend-over backwards to disqualify Americans, just so they hire cheaper imported workers:
"Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers. Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Just make it so that if the H1B visa holder pays a reasonable fee, say, a prorated $20,000, they can leave the job and get another, keeping the visa. Then companies will have to pay US market rates for people.
But frankly, they should be convertible to a green card (permanent resident), we want to steal all the smart people from other countries, not train them for a few years, then send them home.
Plato seems wrong to me today
I think the strategy we're working on now is to lower tarrifs to nothing and wait for transportation costs to skyrocket.
There's a new push to have international cargo screened as thoroughly (and expensively) as humans, as a result of two lettterbombs from Lebanon. This'll make shipping to/from China and India horrifically more expensive, which'll be great for the insourcing crowd..
I don't get why this is all so confusing, anyway.
Not enough talent? Pay more. You'll more talent right away and a lot more talent a few years from now, after which the balance of supply/demand will shift to your favor and you won't have offer as much compensation for that talent.
As a consumer, I sure wish I had the same benefits that corporations have. I could live in America, but pay Indian rent and grocery bills.
I'm an American working at an American company. I'm one of the last handful of American engineers in our company. We've built big facilities in India and elsewhere and as we lay off more US employees, we replace them over time overseas. But this isn't just about that.
I provide high level support for mission critical stuff for big corporations. Pretty much the IT deaprtment of any Fortune 500 company you can think of would fall into line as one of our customers. There are three types of customers that I deal with on a regular basis:
1) Indian IT guy in America (this is maybe 25% of the time).
2) Indian IT guy in India, for American company (this is maybe 60% of the time).
It's surprising how many corporations have all of their work (not just tech support, but infrastructure, management, etc) done in India. And I'm one of the guys that they end up calling when they need help (which seems to be all the time).
The problem is that the foreign person is held to lower standards while the US-based one is held to impossible ones.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
The fact that Obama thinks that millions of previously American jobs that have been outsourced to India is somehow good shows just how out of touch Obama is with regular America. America needs jobs, and those jobs used to provide careers to Americans. What happened to the Democrat party defending American jobs?
Mr Obama, please get back in tough with the needs to of the American people. Didn't your parties recent thrashing in the election send a message that you need to listen to?
Actually, Obama is right. Yes, its counter-intuitive, but if you actually study economics, it makes perfect sense. The gist of it is that if a job gets offshored to a country that can do the same job for cheaper, Americans benefit by having access to that cheaper product or service (there may or may not be a reduction in quality, but for many things this may not be an issue. I hate offshore call-centers though.) You may think: who gives a shit if I have cheaper goods if I'm out of a job!? Well, fair enough, losing a job is a shitty thing, and if you have to get a lower paying job, you won't be directly better off, but overall, America is better off for it. Look at the chair you're sitting on, the desk your computer is at, the clothes you're wearing. Most likely, many of those things were not made in the US, and you probably benefitted greatly from it. I recently went to a Renaissance Faire around here and bought a traditional Renaissance Style outfit. It was all handmade, right here in america, by small local vendors. It also cost me $300. It was high quality, but very expensive. Day to day, I don't need that kind of quality. At the moment I'm wearing a pair of $5 pajama pants from Target. There would be no $5 pants if everything were made in the US.
What I'm getting at is that offshoring lowers the *cost of living*, by giving regular people access to nicer goods at lower prices, which in turn means that even if you get a job as a janitor, you're certainly living a better life than even the rich people from 100 years ago. If you walk into Target today, all that stuff, clean and nice and made for middle america, is because of offshoring. You don't *need* to make as much money with offshoring because everything is dirt cheap now.
That said, losing your job will *not* make your life better, obviously. In general, losing jobs is a crappy side effect. But losing jobs is kind of a one time thing. Many people may have lost manufacturing jobs in the 80's when things started to be made elsewhere, but in the current generation of kids, there won't be a huge number of them who will lose a factory job, because they won't be trying to *get* a factory job. They'll be trying to get some other job that the US is more capable of. They'll get an engineering job or something that is more likely to stay here. Or they will be a happy janitor because even janitors have a good life nowadays. But it doesn't make sense for us to make things that someone else could make for cheaper - that is an inefficient use of our economy, and it causes bloat and wastes money. If someone else is better at doing something, we should let them do it. That's called specialization, and pretending it doesn't make sense it hurting our economy.
Globalization helps us all overall. It has lowered the standard of living accross the world for generations. Losing your job is really shitty, but the answer is not to just move backward and resist globalization. What we *should* do is find some way to keep globalizing without hurting individuals in the US, but I haven't heard of a good solution to that yet. No american should be left behind, but we also can't make our economy less efficient by trying to protect everyone.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
Here's a question for you, would you be any better off talking to Daquan from Detroit or Bubba from Alabama? Part of our problem is that the American skill set gap is widening. When we have high school "graduates" that cannot read on an eighth grade level, how are they going to do any better than Pradeep in Bangalore? Realistically, your next higher price point from current outsourcing is undereducated American vs highly educated Indian, so really we just need to get companies from taking the cheapest labor to just cheap labor over there.
Wrong.
Because it would start a trade war and kill the global free market. Better to pressure India to remove their tariffs. And speaking of tariffs, maybe we ought to drop OUR tariffs that inflate American sugar prices, so that we can replace High fructose corn syrup in food with cheap sugar
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
the part you are missing is this. Republican borrowing and spending = patriotic and fiscally responsible. don't look at the debt, please. Democrat borrowing/taxing and spending = communism = evil. Americans are very simple minded anymore it seems. everything a republican does is conservative. everything a democrat does is communistic fascist evil. neither is correct but they do their job: get us upset and mad at the "other" guy. meanwhile all the politicians collect big fat checks, live in mansions, and take the proverbial dump on their constituents every day. but anger from platitudes sustains people like ScrewMaster. as long as he can blame someone else he's happy.
On a positive note, the tea party is more likely to get behind Paul than Palin. It's just that the news prefers to sell you Palin, she's a poster child for dumb masses and that's exactly what they want you to think of the Tea Party as... A mass of dumb people.
It's a mass of people, with dumb ones in it. You'll find that in just about every political movement. Typically in very similar proportions. Which ones the cameras are focused on determines what the media wants you to think.
Mind the frickin' laser...
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.
You're a fool. The President alone has no power to increase/decrease the deficit. Look who controlled the House and Senate (the ones who approve the budget) in your table and I think you'll see who has the better track record of decreasing deficits.
IBM is not the issue, they are an existing business, whatever their deal is with US gov't, they'll make it through, don't you worry about them.
Worry about start ups, worry about capital. US lost its way.
People most definitely did not come to USA for rules and regulations and taxes.
Let me repeat it: rules and regulations and taxes are definitely not the reason for people to come to the US.
The reason to go to USA was always ability to be an entrepreneur, to start your own business and make it better for yourself. It wasn't about getting gov't handouts either, it also wasn't about sponsoring gov't terrorism and wars. It wasn't about empire building. It wasn't about crashing the currency by first creating the Fed, then getting off the gold standard and setting interest rates to 0% while printing trillions.
Enjoy your remaining time of still being able to buy something with those pieces of paper, the time is running out.
How do I know the time is running out? Because now the US Fed has finally become the lender of last resort to US gov't. 600 Billion they'll print over 7 months is about equal to the amount the US gov't is aiming at borrowing by June of 2011, that is NOT a coincidence. What it is, is that the Fed and US gov't now see that US bond is on its last legs, nobody wants to buy and keep financing US debt. The Fed will completely monetize the debt.
Monetizing the debt - this should scare the living crap out of anybody who wants to do business in the country, well, unless they are THE gov't. Monetizing the debt, the way Zimbabwe did it, Argentina did it, Weimar Germany did it, the way USSR did it.
The best interest of US is to create US jobs, but the US gov't has gone insane and senile, it is actively fighting anybody who is willing to save money in US holdings by killing their savings with inflation. US gov't IS THE REASON US HAS NO JOBS.
US gov't is killing US economy by killing US currency.
Sure, it was able to print and print forever since the Fed started, but the US has never being in this sort of peril as it is now since after the year 1921. In the year 1920 US has entered a severe recession. The gov't did the only correct thing: cut itself by over 70%. The recession was gone in 1 year. Then US had the 'roaring twenties' and then the Fed created another asset bubble in equities and caused another recession. That time though the US gov't decided to fight it by printing money and gov't projects. That got itself a colorful name - the Great Depression, which didn't end until the WWII, when USA was able to start selling weapons, then later the world was in ruin and US was not, so it quickly retooled its weapons factories and started actually producing civilian goods by employing all that cheap labor that came back from the war.
The US gov't is a luxury the US can no longer afford.
The US gov't is now not only a luxury, but it is a vampire sucking the last drops of blood from the dying corps, and you are telling that MY ways are in error?
Well, I am going to sleep, it's late night where I am and it's not the US.
You can't handle the truth.
Hear Hear! I frankly don't care about the numbers, I care about what I'm seeing with my own two eyes. About half the people in my apt building aren't the same ones from a year ago NOT because the old tenants found a better place to live, but because they lost everything. Some may be lucky enough to sleep on someone else's couch, the rest are probably living in their cars.
Between the illegals and H1-Bs we've seen flooding the area there are pretty much NO jobs for Americans except McJobs, and unless you are living in your mom's basement you can't even feed yourself on one of those. When I was young a man with a good work ethic that couldn't afford to go to school or didn't have the aptitude for it could go into construction and feed his family. Now the local teens play a game called "Deer run" where you walk by a construction site and yell "Immigra!" and watch as the ENTIRE SITE turns into a ghosttown, with illegals running everywhere.
I personally had hoped to get my bachelors followed by my masters in either Comp Sci or maybe Information Security, but after going to job interviews in the state capital where it is obvious they've rigged the game for H1-Bs (requirements like 10 years experience, program in 2 languages, 4 certs required, for a $19k a year job? Obvious much?) convinced me there simply isn't a future long term in IT and the amount of debt I would have had to add at 40 simply would bury me. Basically the only "computer jobs" open to Americans I've seen are likewise Geek Squad McJobs. My friends in IT are going to interviews where there are 400+ guys applying for a single job, and most are so far in debt they will most likely die broke. Year before last the guy down the hall committed suicide simply because there was no way out of his student debt with the pathetic jobs being offered to Americans.
And THIS is the chilling effect seen by Americans from illegals and H1-Bs. My oldest is going to pre-med and at his school the IT dept is nearly 100% foreign, simply because no kid with eyes would want to pile on 60k+ worth of debt for a 20k a year job. Looking out my apt window at the tons of empty businesses and homes that have lain empty with for sale signs for over a year I personally think we are getting ripe for a revolution. You have HUGE teeming masses of unemployed Americans, growing ever larger by the day, and for most of them the American dream is long dead. I could very easily see a radical protectionist hardcore Joe Stalin type easily gaining power, because the people are fed up, they're frustrated, and they have NO future if they aren't in the top 3%. The few guys I know still in IT are looking for ways out as fast as they can, because more and more they are surrounded by Indians with degrees they paid a hell of a lot less than we did. This shit just can't keep up, something has got to change.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Solution: Why not raise our import tariff rates to match that of our so-called trading partners?
Because the politicians (and make no mistake, I'm talking both major parties in the U.S.) are bought and paid for by the multinational corporations.
That's a great idea, if you want to start another Great Deprerssion. Protectionist laws like the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act virtually shutdown international trade causing the world's economy to collapse. US exports themselves declined by 61%, falling from "US$5.4 billion to US$2.1 billion". Before Pres Herbert Hoover signed it more than a 1000 economists warned him not to, but of course he did. In retaliation other national governments passed their own protectionist laws.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Sorry, no. We need an intimate familiarity with DCTs, Fourier, and hardware micro-architecture. The number of Americans who have this is very, very small.
It is not zero, true, and we hire them when we can find them. But finding them gets rarer every year.
Simple fact: if you're just after a generic Java programmer code monkey, fine, there are loads of Americans. If you need more advanced skills, however, you're mostly looking at Indians, Russians, and Chinese. Believe me, I wish there were more Americans, but there just aren't.
Yawn degrees, 4 years of school is about as useful as 2 years at a real job, at least that's what my state says in it's hiring practices. I've hired plenty of people what degree you have is important for maybe your first or second job after that it's a check box at best. The big issue I've seen with h1b visa labor is the majority are study for the test types they have no passion for the work it's just a means to have a better life. It's the same thing as the kid in school that crams before a test to get a grade and has forgotten most of it a week later forget several years. I don't care to know what large corps are looking for besides replaceable cogs. When I'm hiring I'm looking for one of two things a star that can solve the hard problems so they don't happen again or the guy with an attentive eye that will take the time to get the grunt work done right every time. I've never interviewed a h1b that fit either category, I've worked with them but they were hired by an Indian owned start-up and they has as much trouble finding good people as I did.
No sir I dont like it.
This is not quite true either. I have been in the Green Card process for almost 11 years now and have been steadily renewing my H1 every time it comes around. This is because they realized (to some extent) that they completely jumped the shark on the immigration process and allow us to keep renewing our H1 visa's while we are still in the Green Card process. For the first 9 years of that process I was stuck with a pig of an employer that made sure he abused me as much as he could because I was unable to switch jobs. So once I hit the Employment Authorization phase I was out of there like a shot.
Well, I will admit it is quite possible that I don't "get it", but as a senior engineer with decades of experience who has seen the program in operation firsthand, I think I'm qualified to make some observations.
I'll add one more. Engineers are not exactly made; nor are they born. Rather, they are made from people who are born to be engineers, and there's a certain window of opportunity for accomplishing that.
Please read this carefully, before you get bent out of shape about my "not getting it".
A *great* software engineer has the capacity to create *many* jobs around himself. Even a very good one can do this. The supply of people who, by the time they are about to enter college are prepared to become even a decent engineer is limited. Nor is this a problem we can fix with overnight with slogans or dramatic gestures like kicking all the foreign engineers out of the country, which is only going to accelerate offshoring.
If you want more American students to choose an engineering path, you've got to make sure there are domestic jobs for them when they expect to graduate. In order for there to be jobs for them, there must be a thriving domestic technology industry. In order for that to exist, you need to have plenty of talented engineers. It doesn't make a damn bit of difference where those engineers came from, but it makes a *hell* of a lot of difference where they're going to.
Now I understand the folks who want to eliminate or cut back the H1-b program because as it is structured now it's a swindle designed to make moving American jobs to low wage countries easy. But getting rid of the program isn't going to fix the damage done to the country's intellectual infrastructure. It'll make that damage worse.
My suggestion for creating more jobs for American engineers: allow any foreigner who shows real promise to come over here, then make it attractive for the most successful ones to put down roots here. In fact, if an employer can't get at least half the H1bs he sponsors to become permanent residents, he should lose the privilege of sponsoring them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's not all-or-nothing. We should tariff lopsided trade. For example, if we set the lopsided limit at 120%, then tariffs would be applied to all countries who sell more than 120% in the US than they buy from US.
That would encourage them to not play currency games and to spur open, domestic consumption.
But the problem is that Asia doesn't want to encourage consumption. They see excess consumption as "sinful", or at least harmful to their residents.
They pick jobs over stuff, while we in the US do the opposite. It's difficult to form a trade policy when they have a different idea of what the "rules" should be.
Table-ized A.I.
Cost of living, and therefore salary, varies WIDELY based upon location. In some areas in this country you would be very hard pressed to scrape by a living off of 40k while others you could live in a comfortable apartment and still be saving up enough to buy a house in a few years.
But across the board the cost of education has risen 4-6% versus 2% for inflation (Understanding Rising Costs of Education), and with skilled/degreed workers like any product, when the cost of production increases that cost is passed on to the consumer, in this case, employers.
From your numbers given a 2% inflation rate I assume you started work 15 years ago at $30,000 a year to come up with an adjusted salary of 40k. However, if you use the rate of inflation of 6% for the cost of education you get around 72k. Since education is a one time cost (unless you need to get further degrees to continue advancing) then a reasonable salary would be somewhere between those figures so 60K isn't unreasonable at all depending upon location and the supply/demand for graduates with the specific degree in question.
Make the penalty appropriate. The fine should be the salary and benefits valuation for the employee/H1-B in question. Also, as there is an allotment of H1-B visas per company, they should lose that visa and now be allowed to hire any more on visa for five years from the last infraction.
We should also do away with job shopping visas. There should NEVER be an immigrant visa system where someone is brought here to then find a job when the purpose was to fill a niche that cannot be filled locally.
I propose a different system:
H1-B visas should be for the best of the best from any another nation, where the person wants either experience or citizenship. If they can remain here for some period of time (2-5yrs, depending on visa), not commit any crime, pay all their taxes and establish themselves here, they should be granted citizenship or asked to leave if they refuse it, without the ability to return on a work visa for the same term as their original one.
Make it an express lane to get talented, law abiding people from other nations to fill the gaps in our ability and not job shoppers from India, Sri Lanka, Russia, China, Australia, England, or wherever.
"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."
I'll tend to agree there - most conservative feel that money spent on "defense" to be worth it and do not see it as something that should have caps. They see spending on social programs as propping up people who will not work for whatever reason.
"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"
And this is where the democrats lost - a billion a day is roughly 365 billion a year. We are looking at more than trillion new spending - MUCH more than a billion a day. You can include *everything* the Republicans have ever spent in the history of the us and almost not equal what we have (for one thing the Democrats accepted that spending on "defense" too). Running on anti-fiscal largess and the subsequent spending is one of the main things that killed the Democrats. That money also went to something that was truly unpopular so as far as "affect on the voters mind" double it. Many will put up with spending when they feel it is needed, spend on things that they feel aren't (regardless of if it is) let alone truly *unwanted* and you get even worse, further have a great deal of why you were elected to be a low spender and it is even worse. Thus the total rape of the so called "Blue Dog Democrat" who weren't as Blue Dog as what they ran as.
"If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too."
To a liberal/leftist. To a conservative not so much. To a centrist I do not know - centrists are much harder to gauge as they tend to still be hard with their ideas, just have a mix of them. I rather guess that the "best" in terms of winning votes right now would be to exclude military spending, be more discrete in where we spend on it, fix social security (not really sure what this means though - *long* post there), scrap HCR and start over (even if it takes years to work out), and mostly try and move back from your party's extremes.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
WTF? Your list looks trivial for any EE graduate. Heck, looks very much doable for me with some training (physics PhD).
Maybe things are different here in Germany, but I personally know ~10 people that could do that.
Although none of them would even remotely consider working in the USA. And none of them would work below 110-120k USD...
Maybe that is more of a problem?