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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Oral Roberts who wrote (1872)	12/4/2003 1:32:29 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 90947

Of course, I agree with you... in the micro sense you want your corporations to be as lean and mean as possible, and in many cases that means staff up the very high level folks here and push all the support staff either to India or to "subcontracting small businesses" which pay minimum wage and offer no healthcare. In the purest case of corporation X, that is the wise approach. But here is the problem, taking a company like Intel who has engaged in this practice of severe cost cutting and offshoring... as months went by they noticed their own market start to erode, no more "upgrade cycle" in the US, this is because other companies are doing exactly what Intel did and sending all the support staff to India and China. No more workers, no more computers and down we go. Before you say Intel will gain more share in China/India, let me just say that is likely true, but if there is no net gain to US workers, and the resulting benefits only go to investors that is not a win. The US economy is fairly intertwined and relies on the consumer. It is naive to think that the largest companies can offshore half their workforce and our economy can boom again as a result. I don't know what the answer to this issue is but I think we have some hard questions to deal with as a nation. For one thing, with few good jobs more and more workers are uninsured and states can't handle the burden, which is one reason the states are all broke. We can't go on like this. Other countries have dealt with this matter of the giant sucking sound to varying degrees. Japan just closed up the borders to anybody and that didn't work. Wealth concentrated at the top where even the most educated non-elites can only grab at crumbs is THE recipe for government upheaval. I can already see Unions gaining more support than before, I don't think anybody thinks that is a good idea.