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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AK2004 who wrote (530634)	1/27/2004 2:26:05 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

One the narrow subject, IBM has ALWAYS hired tons of people overseas. It's nothing new for them. On the broader subject, there's no question that the US is in real danger of become the next third world, economically, over a few decades. That's as it should be, because WE need to make some reforms FAST!: 1) ALL taxation on capital formation, including the fraudulant hidden tax disguised as the "corporation" income tax, should be abolished. Not modified, abolished. 2) The barbarian hordes of tort lawyers should be rounded up and shoved behind barbed wire-and not fed or released until they give up their law licenses permanently. 3) All federal regulations should be sun-setted IMMEDIATELY, and no new regulations approved until they have had widely-published economic impact statements. 4) The Social Security and Medicare frauds should end TODAY, and the government permanently barred from entering the insurance and money-management businesses ever again. 5) The anti-American left should be PURGED permanantly from all institutions of any influence, including politics, academia, the professions, the media, the "arts", and commerce. 6) All schools in all states should immediately be privatized and forced to compete with each other. Teachers' unions should be outlawed, and any attempt to oganize one made a felony. When we stop pricing ourselves OUT of the world economy, we will re-discover the reason why we LEAD it. Otherwise that lead will become history...

To: AK2004 who wrote (530634)	1/27/2004 2:51:54 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

you are correct the US lost auto and consumer electronics to asia, at a dear cost to US workers I might add. Fortunately the US economy invented something new. But the problem I have with your analogy is that you act like it was somehow GOOD to lose those industries, which btw were both much more mature than what is being dumped offshore now. My father was in the car business in the 70s, and I personally have NO INTEREST in going through a 70s-style economy in this country ever again in order for the supply siders to make an economic point. I have no interest in politicians that deliberately allow the export of optical networking or what have you, industries that are barely emerging, for nothing more than a one time profitability benefit, that allows US CEOs to expense stock options and still keep their huge pay packages (which imho is the main motivation for offshoring). U.S. Leaders Either Don't Understand or Prefer Not to Understand the IT Outsourcing Crisis, So Here's the Cliff Notes Version In the 1950s and '60s in England, there was a phenomenon they called the "brain drain," which was the mass emigration of scientists and engineers to the United States. The UK was still suffering from World War II, which had a much greater effect on that country's economy than on that of the U.S. Americans and even many younger people from Britain have little understanding of how difficult it was for that country to recover after the war. The war ended in 1945, but food rationing continued in some form in the UK until 1954, and foreign exchange restrictions remained in place well into the 1960s. The package holiday industry was invented solely because it was the only way to have a vacation in sunny Spain when you were only allowed to take £25 in cash out of the country. Against this austere economic landscape, America with its big cars and big salaries and technical industries with big ambitions looked to be the place to go. We as a nation benefited immensely from this migration as European science gave us the bomb and took us to the moon. Europe and the UK, in turn, did not particularly benefit from this technical exodus, which hurt their local industries and local economies. That was then and this is now, and while America remains a country of great technical capability, that capability is being compromised by a new kind of brain drain as we simply allow our local industries to fall apart. Send enough technical work to India or China, and what once was the engineering department ends up working down at Home Depot. The industries that are being particularly affected are information technology, telecommunications, and aerospace. These are also the only U.S. industries that in the 1990s produced substantial trade surpluses. We are shipping overseas the only manufacturing work that still makes money for America. Who wants this? The government of the United States doesn't want it, at least not in principle. The various state governments absolutely don't want it. The employees don't want it. The only groups who really want this are investors and top management -- two groups that have the shortest time perspective, thinking no further ahead usually than the next financial quarter. I am not advocating protectionism, just prudence. Our economy is in a transition that our leaders choose to ignore. I'm not only unsure how any of the candidates come down on this issue, I am unsure whether they even understand the issue. And the same goes for the current administration in Washington. We are making short-term decisions that are not in the long-term interest of our nation. Maybe those decisions are inevitable, but I'd like to understand what it is that makes them so. Because from my calculations covered in previous columns, the savings isn't really there at all. pbs.org