Note: This was a comment on the outsourcing thread. It got too long, so I made it a diary.
Several hundred thousand textile jobs move from Massachusetts to the Piedmont of the South (1880-1960). It is progress. It is the New South. It is great.
Forget the lives lost in the failed attempt to unionize the textile industry in the South in the 1930s. Forget that discrimination in employment as a result of segregation keeps wages low, reducing the economic power this change until after the end of legal segregation.
This progress is what will teach our citizens to read, write, and calculate. We have taken the Yankee's industry. This is Robert E. Lee's revenge.
Several hundred thousand textile jobs move from the South to India, then Pakistan, then Honduras, the Vietnam and Cambodia. It is progress. It is great.
Forget about the labor standards in the new locations of the textile industry. Textiles are a footloose industry; that is, they can pick up and move somewhere else without a lot of hassle and expense.
Improve education in the South so that people can get some of those new high-tech jobs. Establish business research parks to attract the R&D laboratories of the knowledge economy.
Several hundred thousand high-tech jobs relocate from the US to India. It is progress. It is great. Stop whining.
Forget about the local economies that have been cratered by the loss of high income jobs. Forget that high tech is so specialized that transfer of skills is less possible. Forget the demon "overqualification" that prohibits someone who used to program logistics systems from working on a shipping dock. Forget the programmers from India who became US citizens after they found jobs in the US that they could not in any other country.
The internet has made everything a footloose industry. This helps the US.
Just retrain for other jobs. Just discover that HR departments look warily at people who change their "career".
Just get a job.
Now do you understand why this is an issue? What are the next highly-paid jobs? Real estate? Where there is everyday a news article about another bubble? Retail, where new workers are always part-time? WalMart and McDonalds?
Kerry plan approaches this issue these ways:
* Make sure that taxpayers are not subsidizing the outsourcing of their own jobs
* Restore demand in the US economy by improving the income situation of the middle class through tax cuts
* Raise taxes on upper incomes to reduce deficits, releasing investment funds to the commercial sector
* Create high-tech industries, such as renewable energy, so new that technically trained people can transfer their information technology skills to new areas.
* Deal with healthcare costs so that all businesses can cover all workers and fringe benefits do not become a block to adding employees
* Increase the incomes and the quality of life of the citizens of our trading partners by renegotiating trade treaties so that free trade no longer comes with environmental destruction and sweatshop labor