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Hillary Clinton Takes Data.gov Overseas
theodp writes "ZDNet reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's office issued a fact sheet during her visit to India confirming that the U.S. and India will be working together to develop an open source version of the Data.gov project, which was launched in 2009 by off-to-Harvard Federal CIO Vivek Kundra to serve as a central repository of data collected by the US government. The Hindu Business Line notes that Clinton was also pressed to exempt Indian techies in the States on H-1B or L1 visas from U.S. social security taxes, an exemption that, if granted, could reportedly result in savings of at least a billion dollars for the country's software industry."
This is not about outsourcing though.
An exemption that would also cause an even more vitriolic backlash from American workers who would become even more expensive relative to Indian H1B and L1 holders because of a tax that only the Amish and a few others can avoid (for now).
They'd have a case here if American developers could legally bow out of FICA. I'd take that deal without hesitation. I know a lot of developers who'd love to step outside that system and have the money for their 401ks and FSA/HSA instead.
That would be home made Kombucha.
The search results (except yahoo) were mauled by paid placement schemes long ago, before the terroristic redirecting malware was even thought of.
Ms. Clinton is doing software sales & service now? Talk about popular trends?
as a protectorate of India!
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
open source wont save you know
Even the .gov is outsourcing. USA! USA! USA!
oh wait, there is no global union of IT workers....
(not yet anyway)
Lord Vishnu thanks you, Hilary.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
23 year old mechanical engineer here, where do I sign out of Social Security?
So what they want every IT job to be outsourced now ? Jesus this getting sad. Unemployment is sky high but where gonna give more tax breaks to H1Bs ......
They don't even care to pretend to act in the best interests of the citizenry anymore. It's absolutely brazen.
--- Do you believe in the day?
I'm a US citizen, and I firmly believe the gov't will piss away all my Social Security 'savings' before I hit retirement age. I'm in my mid-thirties and most of my friends feel the same way.
I think it's screwed up that foreign workers have to pay into a retirement system they will never see a nickle from. I also think young people today paying into a system that we have no faith in is screwed up. It should be an optional system.
Thanks, biatch.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Screwing up good processes at State Dept., that is.
This is strictly anecdotal evidence from personal experience, but under previous administration scheduling visa interview at US consulate abroad was a matter of going to a website and doing some clicks.
Under Clinton that changed into two phone calls to the consulate: first to pay some bucks for the privilege to talk to a call center rep and second is to schedule appt.
Job creating, my ass.
So now companies can get a huge discount on taxes when they hire software developers overseas compared to hiring people local to the US? Were not talking about a small amount of money either.
Amazing that she just comes right out like that and says, "Yes, let's make things HARDER for the American worker. Let's give businesses even MORE reason to hire non-Americans." Ms. Clinton - aren't you supposed to be working for _us_?
It says she was pressured to exempt them from Social Security taxes. Where does it say she actually took that into consideration, or even listened to them?
You are a fucking moron.
This angers me beyond belief! We have plenty of development talent here in the United States. I am so sick of the erroneous belief that Indians make better programmers. It is simply not true. Too often I have seen an inferior product. If a large sector of America is unemployed, why are we importing labor? I thought that Clinton and Obama were against H1B visas. Fucking politicians .... Promise one thing and do another.
Mrs Hillary Clinton, you should be here the development of everything that is USA
India ASKED her to exempt them from taxes, she DECLINED to do so, India has PRESSED her again... So even Clinton isn't that dumb.
A lot of vague talk on working with them to market data.gov to other nations.... words.... cheap.
Promises on Cybercrime from the Indians.... words,... cheap. They're a big malware laden pirate software market, up there with Russia & Turkey.
Newsflash: Asshole, self-righeous Slashdotter can't read.
Go back and reread the summary, idiot. And maybe the article, if you can be bothered. Nowhere does it say she is interested in exempting anyone on visas from taxes. It says she was pressured to.
I was on an H1-B for a while (in academic research, not software development, as it happens), and was puzzled at the time by the requirement to pay US Social Security taxes -- the H1-B is a visitor visa, not an immigrant visa, it's time-limited, and when it runs out, the assumption is that the individual will return to their home country. I would imagine that very few H1-B visa holders ever recover this money, so it's effectively a tax on the employer, paid into the SS trust fund.
Having H1-B holders not make SS contributions seems reasonable to me -- if you want to tax H1-B activity, you can always just raise the fees for the visa itself, to get the same effect -- but having only Indian H1-B holders be exempt from the SS contribution just seems bizarre.
The summary is unclear, but on the grounds of basic common sense, I hope that pressure and lobbying went nowhere.
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
WTF??? As if we didn't take enough of a hit in 2001-2003, we're going to open up the floodgates to India AGAIN??? I'd like a little protection here please, Mrs. Clinton.
Yeah, who wouldn't want to subject all of their retirement savings to the booms and busts of a corrupt private market?
The figures you mention are, as you said, for EACH FISCAL YEAR. There are many more than 20,500 (or even 65,000) H1-B visa holders in the US. I'm sure that you're a precious snowflake, but you're kidding yourself if you think that no one in a nation of 300 million could do the work you're doing.
Doing anything to save money in this kind of situation is a good thing. It doesn't matter if we have plenty of development talent in US, if that talent is too expensive. Would you build an HTPC using a quad-Xeon board?
The warning sign here is that there was a billion dollars to "save" (did they really get the price down from $1,000,050,000 to $50,000?) and that a project as simple as a website is such a big deal that a Secretary of State is needed in its negotiations. Everything about that stinks of a complete ripoff, where taxpayers are going to be kickbacking to someone who helped/will_help fund a political campaign. There just isn't any other believable reason for this kind of nonsense.
Because it costs less. Those unemployed Americans haven't been unemployed long enough, so they haven't yet learned to be competitive enough to underbid Indians.
Face it, nobody believes the economy is weak. Minimum wage laws aren't getting repealed, government still spends huge amounts of money, etc. We act like we are a super-wealthy society whose government's coffers are so overbrimming with gold, that the government can afford to do more than what is required of it. Things like taking care of people, instead of merely protecting their rights. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, if we're as wealthy as we think we are. Maybe we really are that wealthy and all the "the economy sucks" talk really is bullshit. I don't know.
H1B is not taking your jobs, Outsourcing is.
Workers under H1B may be appealing to some degree because they are cheaper and more over-workable, but they can be counted in the thousands, and they still help the economy by spending what they earn.
Outsourced jobs, on the other hand, are in the millions and much more appealing economically to large companies. There's several millions of outsourced jobs, not only in India, but also taken by Chinese, east Europeans, Russians and Latin Americans.
Also the tale that foreigners are less talented and that Americans should be hired instead is no longer relevant, the same way that china raised it's production standards the rest of the world is doing the same and each year there's more and more companies with excellent track records ready for outsorcing jobs from US and Euro companies.
This is the real effect of globalization and opening trade. Rich countries thought they could own poorer countries by forcing them to compete equally and purchase their goods while providing cheap labor. This had the expected result of destroying most of the local industry in such countries and forcing them to rely on imports.
However, no one expected the software industry to become so relevant worldwide. Cheap labor suddenly became cheap outsourcing, and there is no way first world workers can match the cheap costs of the third world, so this trend will continue and get worse.
But, what the heck, let's to do everything to make sure there's even less going into the fund. Makes sense to me.
It is India asking Clinton for the SS exemption.
Ahem.
YMMV.
Some people here seem think eliminating social security taxes would mean you get to keep that extra money. Consider instead that most employers will just cut pay. Many people wouldn't even notice since the $ amount stays the same on their paychecks.
Why do you think the emphasis was on how much money the software industry could save? It won't be any different when they "privatize" Social Security for Americans.
the worse problem. It's hard to hire a 60k a year programmer when you can hire 10 6K a year programmers.
But H1B's don't help either. Ideally they should be paid market rates, but employers bring them in as junior programmer (lower cost) and once here, the H1B acts like a straight-jacket, making more difficult for the employee to quit/change jobs.
I'm better than an H1B - by a long shot - but financially it's hard to argue with an H1B and offshoring.
The solution for me is to open my own business. Provide the contracting/consulting/marketing that H1Bs and offshoring don't provide. Then when I get a contract, I can hire those guys cheap, verify the work, and rake in the difference as profit.
The long term solution is for this recession/depression to continue...as the dollar keeps falling against the rupie - those 6K programmer are suddenly 30k...and offshore...and everything else that makes offshoring and H1B difficult.
No wonder Indian officials are screaming to exempt their workers from Social Security.
Lucifer Clinton doesn't give a rip about the US or any of the slaves living here. She's busy laying the groundwork for the New World Order, in which she will be one of the ruling elites. I mean, she spent more money securing a beard for her mistress Huma Abedin than I spend on everything over 10 years. And he couldn't even keep his hands off the Tweeter to keep from screwing that up.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
A fair portion of the Dropkick Murphys discography is a celtic punk expression of that idea.
(would suggest them anyways)
Would you want a sick physician prescribing medication for you?
How about a mechanic driving a shitbox fixing your car?
How about an Indian developing for Americans?
This is all smoke and mirror welfare for India, which without prejudice is as much a third world dump as a third world dumps goes.
If you saw footages of last week's Mumbai bombings, you couldn't tell which areas were bombed, and which were just nominal.
America is in it for satisfy some autoerotic desire to be relevant in Asia amidst growing Chinese influences.
central repository of data collected by the US government.
Cmon, does this look like a concrete project description of any kind? They need to make it a little more vague. Smoke and mirror...
Surveys have shown that most IT folks vote for Democrats. Enjoy the sellout!
"uh huh. uh huh. well, did you try rebooting it?
uh huh. are you sure its plugged in?
uh huh. well, thank you very much, have a nice day.
"
oh god, the skill!
then at least the Democrats in Congress could go berserk and the press would dutifully report how much the President is selling out the hard working Americans who desperately need his help. Instead this won't even register except on techy sites.
Kind of like how the press and Democrats are doing the big freak out when Republican controlled states are reigning in public employee entitlements and turning a blind eye to the Democrat controlled ones who in many cases are rolling over the employees worse.
I so wish the press wasn't so overtly biased... if anything their lack of action is the best reason to have a Republican as President, then at least we can call them to the carpet when necessary
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
a subsidiary of China.
You choose to work here, you get to pay taxes like the rest of us, including SS taxes.
Sad to say this. India does not believe in social security for its people, even healthcare. Govt believe Indians dont need social security when they are in India and even when they are abroad. They think it is a waste, may be even a tool to sustain the inequalities. But they will have change their view because capitalism is dangerous without social security.
So let me get this straight. The US sends jobs overseas to India when we have high unemployment. Wouldn't the country be better served by using domestic talent, allowing them to spend their hard earned money in our stale economy? Perhaps we need a domestic policy that gives priority for the US government to give jobs to qualified Americans. Make any contractor do the same.
Take a step further, kill the outsourcing bug by offering companies tax incentives to hire domestic talent. I'm sure there isn't a dearth of talent or people that want jobs within our borders.
During here short stay as senator in NY she wasted at least 12k on her Friends of India caucus visiting India (and picking up a big check).
She got the job by trading block votes from our local Hasidim cult for her husbands outgoing presidential pardons so there was no surprise here.
She and Bill do not care how much of America they destroy as long as the checks clear.
The only people that this seriously corrupt US Government wants to tax are the middle & low class. And why not? After all those in power are among the wealthy, why tax yourself?
You know what made me sick recently? General Electric, a 130 billion dollar company, paid less in taxes last year than I did out of my paycheck. Think about that. This information is publicly available. They tax the people that work in this country, then skip the corporations who outsource work to other countries. It's disgusting.
Uh, no. I mean, H1B's are taxed without representation, but not for that reason. Because being eligible for social security isn't representation either. H1B's (and green card holders, who are eligible for social security, and anyone else who is not a citizen but is subject to any federal, state, or local taxes in the U.S., no matter which tax and no matter what benefits they are eligible for) are taxed without representation because they are taxed by the US government (and/or by State governments, including administrative subdivisions of states) but have no right to representation in the US or State government.
Representation in a government is (logically) orthogonal to eligibility for benefits provided by that government.
Actually what India is asking for (note, India is asking: there is no indication that anyone in the U.S. government is doing anything but recieving the request) is that Indian workers employed on notionally temporary Visas in the U.S. are granted an exemption from U.S. taxes that will make hiring such workers in the U.S. more attractive to U.S.-based employers.
We already have one. The issue here is private jobs, not government jobs. Most U.S. government jobs require U.S. citizenship. I think some may accept lawful permanent residents. None allow H-1Bs.