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Asian Call Center Workers Trained With US Tax Dollars
gManZboy writes in with a troubling story about tax dollars being used for overseas call center training. "Despite President Obama's recent call for companies to 'insource' jobs sent overseas, it turns out that the federal government itself is spending millions of dollars to train foreign students for employment in some booming career fields--including working in offshore call centers that serve U.S. businesses. The program is called JEEP, which stands for Job Enabling English Proficiency. It's available to college students in the Philippines through USAID. That's the same agency that until a couple of years ago was spending millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to train offshore IT workers in Sri Lanka. Congressman Tim Bishop (D-New York), told about the program on Tuesday, called it 'surprising and distressing.' Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts."
This just in: Politicians lie. Film at 11.
They *do* increase employment. In China.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Bishop recently introduced a bill that would make companies that outsource call centers ineligible for government contracts.
So they're saying that they're no longer going to purchase HP, Dell, or Acer PCs? Somehow I suspect that bill is just posturing, and will not amount to anything.
They are entry level positions. The US job market's becoming more and more top heavy in the tech industry. People are having harder and harder times getting relevant experience as the foot-in-the-door positions have been moved overseas. Even worse, the same thing's started happening for more experienced positions.
In my current work environment, I've watched T1-3 jobs shuffle overseas. I'm one of the last people that was able to work my way up from an entry level position. Job listings have been demanding higher education coupled with experience, yet the latter is becoming rarer and rarer to come by. It's something that's been building for years and we're staring at a large experience gap in the industry.
Gee, I hope they succeed in bringing all of the call center work back to the United States! I would love to pay higher prices so that my countrymen can work menial jobs for 10 times the pay of their Asian counterparts (which still fails to provide a decent standard of living here), because more expensive products are good for everyday Americans already struggling to get by!
Actually, and all sarcasm aside. you are quite right. The few dollars more that you might spend on your PC, for example, could create living wage jobs for people here in this country. We need some major adjustments to the economy, but the math is what it is and when you stop sucking dollars out of it by off-shoring your labor, things are better. Period. We saw this throughout the eighties in the Pacific Northwest. Reagan's corporate welfare policies allowed corporations to make more money shipping raw logs overseas than they could by processing them into salable products here. The result was the virtually complete collapse of the timber industry. Entire communities became ghost towns when the paper and lumber mills shut down. Same shit, different decade, only on a much bigger scale.
You could cut military spending to zero, and you'd still have a huge deficit. The only ways to eliminate the deficit are big cuts everywhere, big tax increases, or big economic growth.
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My apologies for the long post, but Ron Paul pisses me off. From his own website:
Ron Paul supports the elimination of the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
First line of his tax platform, and we've established that he wants to get rid of the income tax, which is currently the most direct way to put the burden of social support on those who benefit most: the wealthy. If you're of the opinion that everyone should support society equally, whether or not they can afford it, then I guess removing income tax makes sense. That's not my opinion.
To provide funding for the federal government, Ron Paul supports excise taxes...
Excise tax is often connected to "sin tax" for good reason. The government gets to put a tax on anything it wants. The paranoid folks worry about the influence of government on our right to purchase particular things, but what actually concerns me more is the likelihood that a "fair" excise tax is applied to practically everything, so all prices rise by some amount, increasing the total cost of living. If wages also increase, then it's just inflation, and nothing changes (except we're in a worse position in the global economy). If wages don't increase, then the taxes affect the lowest-income population the most, while the middle and upper classes are unaffected.
...non-protectionist tariffs...
I don't think I've ever heard of any tariff that's not protectionist. Raising the price of an import necessarily makes outsourced manufacturing more expensive. Unfortunately, this isn't the 1800's, where America was capable of being (more or less) self-reliant. Americans want their electronics from Asia, and modern companies know this. The higher prices from the tariffs will be passed on to the consumers, which again will mostly hurt the lowest-income population. I don't think that's right.
massive cuts in spending
He defines what will be cut elsewhere. Notably, he intends to close the Department of Energy (because who needs energy research anyway, when you have big energy companies working on fossil fuels?), Housing and Urban Development (which currently manages federal programs for low-income people to buy homes), and the Department of Education (because the states do such a great job already). Less specifically, some other goals are "returning responsibility for security to private property owners" which I interpret to mean cutting federal support for emergency services, and "stopping foreign aid", of which the #1 recipient is Afghanistan. Sure... once we've screwed over a country for 10 years, let's cut off support to rebuild, so we can cut back 1% of the federal budget. He also boasts about his promise to take a personal salary of only $39,000, which is a savings of almost 0.00001% from the federal budget. Then there's his spending freezes, on Medicaid, SCHIP, food stamps, family support, and child nutrition programs.
“I want to abolish the income tax, but I don’t want to replace it with anything. About 45 percent of all federal revenue comes from the personal income tax. ...
He wants to cut out 45% of income, but his vaunted $1 trillion in cuts only total about 33% of expenses. Without replacing the missing 12% of the budget, he's going to have a hard time meeting his promise to have a balanced budget in two years.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.