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I don't mind conservatives. I mind "conservatives" who think tax cuts help them when they make $40,000 a year.

If you make over $200,000 and have a net worth over $5 million, great, be a conservative. If you're making between 0 and $200,000 a year and you're in favor of conservative economic thoery you're essentially saying "please make me pay more taxes so rich people can pay less. Please!"

I think you found your new sig.

Edited, Tue Jan 20 12:17:31 2004 by Atomicflea

Wage inflation isn't an argument for tax cuts for the rich in even the most hyperbolicly hopefull of theories of economics.

Look, since you're incapable of doing so, LET ME MAKE THE RATIONAL ARGUMENT FOR SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMICS FOR YOU.

I don't agree with what follows, but I feel guilty not at least presenting the case for the argument wihtout people dismissing it as drivel because you can't.

BEHOLD!:

Cutting tax rates on people who earn more than $200,000 per year (and yes that's really where the tax relief begins) spurs the economy by freeing up investment capital which otherwise would have been going into government coffers to support governemnt spending. Because there is more investment capital available, buisness are more inclined to expand, start up, or otherwise do things that will create jobs. (NOT wage inflation, wage inflation is bad. Wage inflation leads to inflation which no one wants. If you want to argue that there will be an available position which pays more than your current one because of buisness growth, do so. Arguing that you're going to get raises is counter to the whole theory)

Now. Here's the magic trick part. Everyone with me so far? Free up more capital, companies have access to more money, they hire more people (but preferably don't pay them more for the same job) yadda yadda yadaa. Here's the punchline:

Because these tax cuts increase the overall health of the economy, so many jobs will be created that the increased tax revenue from the people with the newly created jobs will....

MORE THAN COMPENSATE FOR THE LOSS OF REVENUE CAUSED BY THE TAX CUTS

That's it.

That's the whole theory.

That's what made Arthur Laffer a conservative Guru.

The theory is, once again, for the slow ones:

Cutting taxes will initially cause defecits and government debt, but in the long term will spur the economy to such a degree that there will be MORE revenue than there was with higher tax rates. Got that?

Have your cake and eat it too! Lower taxes and more government revenue. A free lunch if you will (Laffers term, not mine).

The resulting economy will produce things more efficently etc. resulting in a better standard of living for everyone without wage inflation, which will just lead to general inflation.

/demagouge off.

Not that it's ever worked. We've never gotten past the crushing national debt part. Anyway, if you want to make an argument for people who make more money than you paying less in taxes (and incidentally they pay less percentage wise than the middle class by leaps and bounds I have no idea whose *** you pulled the idea that the rich shoulder a higher tax burden percentage wise than the middle class from) make it thusly:

"I want to see the US economy as a whole do as well as it can. I believe I will benefit from that because the overall standard of living will be increased and there's the possiblity for me to progressin my carreer due to increased demand for higher paying jobs with more responsibility which fit my skill set."

Then let me know when you lose your job to Abu in Calcutta who can adminster your companies UNIX network remotely for 12 cents an hour so I can laugh at you.

Yeah, those 14 million software development jobs that were moved to India don't count, naturally.

http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/news/Research_Report_Fall_2003.pdf

Sometimes the amazing thing is that I think you actually BELIEVE that it soemthing doens't happen to you personally, it's not happeneing to anyone.

An eightball lasted you all week? Nice!

Just wanted to put in a little on the subject.

Minimum wage, the secret evil.

Part 1:
Ok, if everyone makes more (i.e. seizes the day) would there be enough for them? I mean how many middle managers can you have? How many excecutives can you have? I know, you could always have more companies, but still they would be relatively flat, and more than likely the legal arena would benefit from B2B lawsuits about copyright issues.

That has to be the biggest problem, not everyone can be the corporate executive. Some people still need to make the product. Some people still need to push the papers. Either way, you still need the lower level jobs for the people. The problem is, that there is more incentive for a company to create 2 jobs at part time than one full time job. Which means a person may have to take 2 jobs to get the pay of a full time job, but not get the benefits.

So, assuming you are lucky, you will have gone to school and will end up with the one full time job. You will then use your accolades to move up the chain. There will be incentives for you to help your company, and for your company to help you.

If you are unlucky, you will struggle along every point of your life. You will struggle to get done with HS, you will struggle to get done with college, and you will struggle to find a good job. But you will still succeed. The biggest problem here, is that humans are weak, and all of us can't win every struggle. So in the past, those people were condemned to lower wage jobs. Those jobs weren't really intended to be permanent jobs, or even jobs you live off of. They were mainly transitionary as you gained a tradeskill that could take you somewhere (probably because scholarly fields were not your thing).

Now companies are creating jobs that used to be something that you could make a living off of, and chopping them into seperate jobs that 2 people can not make a living off of. Or knowing there is more competition for even the lowest of jobs (partially due to the fact that there is a larger workforce ala women, seniors, and maybe even teenagers for some jobs). These companies have decided to lower the wages for the least difficult jobs to attain that are still needed to be done. (Does the executive of McD's flip burgers every day? But this isn't really one of those jobs that got chopped up, it started out crummy to begin with)

Part 2:
This chopping comes at the entry/second level of some career fields, and the first tier of management of places like say McDonald's, or Walmart. So since the people want to make sure that the now working poor can pay their bills they decide that there needs to be a minimum wage. Ta da, a minimum wage is created. It means that some people can't get royally screwed over, but for the majority it really means nothing to them.

This is really the point that minimum wage should stop at. Just enough that people can't be taken advantage of. It shouldn't be a living wage, it shouldn't even be a sustainable wage, just one where people can't really be taken advantage of. This makes it so people will really have the incentive to get off their butts and either work up the chain, or find a more career styled job.

Then minimum wage goes up, because people can't make a living off of it, but they're working 40 hours a week. Well of course they can't make a living off of it, it is the minimum wage, not the living wage. This increase raises the costs of everything now, because a couple companies have resorted to just classifying entry level jobs to minimum wage jobs, so that way they can make profit margins bigger. Which makes it harder to live at the new minimum wage, which starts a vicious cycle.

And the combination:
If you really want to see this cycle at work. Come to Washington state. I can almost gaurantee you that we have the highest minimum wage in the country. 7.15/hour or so I think. This means that what could be a living wage in Idaho/Oregon, is now a minimum wage in WA. This really hurts quite a few businesses, and people. The closer the gap that minimum wage gets to those lowest tier jobs though, the more those lower tier jobs get chopped up. Making more people living on minimum wage jobs that were previously working at living wage jobs. Because while the company was forced to raise the minimum wage of it's grunts, it didn't have the money to give raises to those that deserved it.

Oh, and on a final note. I'm a Republican/Liberal. I really don't like Capitalism, and I really don't like Communism, and I really don't like Socialism. They all are based on perfect concepts, when we all know humans are imperfect. When you create a system that is based on humanity's flaws, then maybe I'll like it. I am very conservative on some issues, and very liberal on others. In this case, I'm against creating an extensive network for supporting people, because that gives them incentive to be lazy (a la communism). I do think there should be something there for when you have a **** streak. In today's market it feels like the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get sick, because you will be screwed for a long time if you do (knowing from firsthand experience). It should be relatively short term, so that way you have enough time to recover from shock, and then get back to being a productive member of society.

And as far as the original post goes. I'm against spending more money to encourage people to stay married. Just make it much harder to become married/divorced and that might save a lot of the problems. The space program (was that the other program mentioned) is also right now a waste of money. It's election year rhetoric that's going to ***** NASA. While I do think there should be more stuff devoted towards NASA, don't throw them a small chunk of meat when they need a steak. Either tell them to go balls to the wall w/ the program, or tell them to remain conservative. What Bush is doing now is just a really mean C*$% tease for NASA.

Oh and just one more personal part. Currently unemployed but have several job apps for entry level career jobs. I became unemployed after making a stupid remark during a stressful time of my life, and a customer overheard it. Since that time I took a job packing cheese to help pay bills. I saved money from it even though I had plenty of chances to spend it. I saved money at my first job, even though it didn't pay much either. The first job, and the cheese packing jobs, are both jobs you would not expect someone with a Bachelor's degree to be working. But I did, because I knew that is what I needed. Not to go running home to mom & dad, but to work. I was lucky in that I have a supportive wife, that did have a job. If it wasn't for that then I may have been forced to go back, but she worked at a job, that when she left was given a 50% cut in pay (to that of a new student worker). And was expected to do more work than some staff members getting paid more. And if they hired each function of her job out seperately it would have cost the locale 3-4x the amount that they were paying her (which of course they'll have to do now).

Found the 14 Million jobs!

From the link posted earlier, on page 6, it says there is at risk 14 million jobs. It doesn't say that's how many left, that's how many are at risk according to the paper.

Hehe. Yeah. But I guess if Smash had just said something like: "By golly! You're right. It is primarily jobs that a trained one armed monkey could perform that are being outsourced to other countries", instead of making up some outlandish number that's a couple of orders of magnitude off then I wouldn't have needed to correct him.

You'd think someone who's smarter then everyone else could at least read. Or at least not be so dumb as to post a source that says nothing even vaguely close to his statement. But maybe that's too much to ask?

This thread was better when it was about Bush fixing the ghettos by getting the poor to develop interpersonal communication skills for long lasting marriages.

*throws hands up*

Ok Smash. Where are you getting those numbers? First. Define what you mean by "IT". That can mean a wide range of jobs depending on who you're talking to. Then, define a time period. Is this 1 million jobs last year? Last decade? During the entire history of mankind? That is kinda important if you're trying to make this into some kind of epidemic, don't you think?


What those stats also dont tell you is that virtually all the outsourcing done outside the country (ie: Jobs moving to India) is done in multi-national corporations. While the articles list "cost" as the reason, you can't just assume it's labor costs. If I'm running a multi-national company and I sell and support products and offices all over the world, it makes a hell of a lot of sense to have support staff located in multiple timezones. I'll save a ton of money, and the actual cost for the personel is only a very small part of it. It's about having people located nearer to those offices and available on the phone (or in person!) 24/7 that makes it attractive.

What you're seeing when you look at the last few years is two somewhat unrelated factors. We see a reduction in tech industries in the US due to the dot com crash in 2000. We also see a growth in those same industries (even within the same corporations) in other nations. The reduction in the US is simply because domestic business can't support the numbers that were in those fields in the late 90s. The whole industry was a bubble, and that bubble burst. The growth we're seeing elsewhere is because those markets were *never* grown back in the 90s when the US went through its huge tech boom. You can look at that as a shift from domestic to foreign (and it is), but very little of it's motivated by salary costs of workers in that field. It's a simple matter that there's already enough IT workers in the US to support businesses in the US. There are not yet enough IT workers in other parts of the world to support businesses in those areas. The overall effect looks like a migration from one to another, but that's an incredible oversimplification of the facts.


Sure. Lots of folks get "outsourced". The vast majority are outsourced domestically and it's really just a change in the name of the company you work for. I know a guy who worked the exact same job, at the exact same location, with the exact same people, yet changed companies 4 times over the course of about 7 years. It's really not that big of a deal. Outsourcing outside the country is the exception, not the rule. And at least in the IT industry, cheaper labor is about the least important reason for that outsourcing.


You can pull out articles with vague numbers all you want. I work in the damn field. I talk to people in the field. I go to the conferences. I've heard all the discussions on this. Outsourcing in IT is pretty insignificant really. I don't know of anyone I'd put in the "skilled" category that's terribly concerned about outsourcing. I'll say it again. No matter how much you dress up the titles and categories, it's generally unskilled labor that gets outsourced to other coutries for "cheaper labor costs". While I'm sure you can find some minor numbers of folks that don't fit that model, I can tell you for a fact, that there aren't a whole lot of business professionals in the US sitting around worrying that their jobs are going to be outsourced to India. No matter how much folks like you try to make it sound like that's a concern, aside from alarmist articles, I've never actually met a real live person that's worried.

The folks that are worried are the hourly wage earners sitting in telemarketing centers and in tier1 phone support jobs. Those are the jobs that are going to other countries. Again though, I'd hardly call those positions "skilled".

I just think it's very simplistic to look at trends and small numbers and try to expand them magically into huge problems. Odd that a "few thousand" gets expanded into 100,000, and then 1 million, and then 14 million by the time the telephone-like game of misinformation and FUD ends up being posted on a site like this one.

I completely agree with you that as certain jobs become more cost effective to maintain outside the country, that we're going to see more of them done out of the country. That doesn't mean that we all lose our jobs or become unemployable. It means we expand/change our skillsets and do new things. I have no problem with our industry continually evolving. That's called progress. I said the same thing when factory workers needed to retrain in the 80s. I'll say the same thing even when it's my job that undergoes that process. I just don't look at it as a "the sky is falling" kind of proposition.

I still hold to my original statement. It's generally the less skilled job that move out of the country. You're seeing ITish jobs start to move because computers have become so simple that it takes a simpler skillset to manage them. Fine. I'd much rather the US be the one leading that curve then following it.



Agreed. If that's all that matters, then you are correct. However, I've yet to see a project where the designers/developers didn't want the coders and everyone else involved in the project "close" to them. I get folks who scream if anyone remotely involved in their development effort is moved to another building. This is really dependent on how cutting edge what you are doing is, and therefore how closely everyone involved needs to be. Unless you're going to build your whole product in India, which I've yet to see happen (for a number of IP reasons really that have nothing to do with cost).




Um... Except maybe toggle the power switch? If you have employees and data in the US, you're going to have your sysadmins to support them located "near" them. Sysadmins work wherever the computers are. While the salaries are cheaper in India, their internet infrastructure sucks. You would not ever want to maintain a data center in India that served that data anywhere else. Thus, the guys that maintain that equipment will not be in india. Programmers? Sure. Don't need much network for that. Tech support? Sure. A guy can read answers off a card over a phone no matter where he is. A sysadmin? Nope. Gotta be where the equipment is, and the equipment needs to be where those who use it are. Unless your executives expect to pull down their excell documet for the presentation to the Board from a site in India, you're going to have computers located in the US. That's just the way it is.




I kinda agree on some levels. If all you do is configure systems, you'd be right. Um... In the business, we call those guys "Shrinkwrap sysadmins". They rely totally on software to do their admining for them. Works fine in many cases. But not in most. I'd agree with your MIS assessment as well, since today it's basically just knowing commands for an application instead of the relatively arcane MIS stuff you used to have to know (databases are much much much simpler today). Um... Again. Who's keeping their data in India? No one. Although in that case, you should presumably be able to administer a database completely remotely, you still have a problem with timezones. If your exec needs some data for a presentation in New York and the database crashes, he's going to have a hell of a time if all the MIS folks are asleep in India now isn't he?


Overhead costs and "costs of business" far outweigh labor costs. Delays and downtimes of just a few hours can cost a company more money in lost revenue then their entire IT budget for a year. I'm serious here. Relative labor costs is a nice hot-button issue for people to bring up, but really is the smallest factor involved here. Companies reposition their assets based on where their customers and employees to support those customers are. If they can do that in a more cost effective environment, they will, but no company is going to choose to go with cheaper labor costs if it costs them even a tiny bit more in server/data downtime.



Sure. Why not? It mostly is just tech suppor call center workers. While there's lots of talk/rhetoric about it, the higher skilled and more specialized IT jobs just haven't been migrating. If any part of your job requires you to be located proximate to your customers or your equipment, then you're not going to be relocated unless the entire company relocates. So, when you hear that the business sections of these companies are moving to India, then I'd expect the sysadmin type jobs to follow. Until then, there's plenty of demand for folks with my skillset here in the US.

Um... First. I never said that *no* skilled jobs move out of the country. I said it's "mostly unskilled labor" that moves. Pay attention.

Second. Look at your source first.

From Seattle Time link:

"IBM plans to move thousands of jobs to India and China to reduce costs, union officials said."

Let's review that last bit: union officials said

Wow. A group that has a vested interest in getting workers to oppose the practices of the company they work for making a claim that the company is going to outsource all their jobs. The shock! The horror! I'm sure there's no self interest there at all...

I don't subscribe to the Times, so I can't show you (although I'm sure it's there as well) how poor the source for that article is, but let's look at the Times of India article:


" The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that IBM would move the work of as many of 4,730 US software programmers to India, China and elsewhere. The unannounced plan, which the newspaper said it viewed in company documents, would replace thousands of workers at IBM facilities in Southbury , Connecticut, Poughkeepsie in New York, Raleigh, North Carolina, Dallas, Boulder in Colorado, and elsewhere in the United States."


Ok... Um. First off. How many exactly is "as many as 4,700? If my math theory classes hold true, zero technically is within that set (as are all negative numbers. Heck! They're moving people away from India and into the US! wow! I can play with numbers too!). This is what's knowns as lying with numbers. The paper makes that claim and it seems really dramatic. However, if later it turns out that like 3 guys loose their jobs, they can state that technically 3 fits the set of "as many as 4,700", so they didn't lie.


Also. It's "unannounced", but the newspaper claims it "viewed in company documents". Um. Where'd the get the documents? How valid are they? Who wrote them? Are they approved? Or just white papers? How much you want to bet that the Times recieved these documents from the aforementioned Union?


There's a word for this sort of reporting Smash. It's called FUD. Stands for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt". The idea is to spread rummors and half truths and make them sound like more then they are.

If I assumed that everything that is written up in a company document was actually going to happen, I'd have moved like 8 times, seen a half dozen buildings built, be using a bewildering array of different software products that all do the same thing, and have about 100 times as many computers to work with then I do now. You worked in the government for how many years and you don't understand how proposals work? Something like 1% of all ideas written up in documents ever happen.


How about we wait and see how many people actually end up losing their jobs at IBM? Heck. How about if instead of posting articles that are forward looking (and basically guessing), you find me some about folks actually losing their jobs becuase they were replaced by someone in another country. I thought that was the point of the stats you posted earlier, and those showed an extremely tiny number of jobs moving, and couldn't conclusively state that those were moved directly or were simply the result of a reduction in force here combined with increases in manpower elsewhere (not like businesses that are expanding worldwide might need to actually hire folks in the countries they're doing business in though. That's just crazy talk!).

I'm not burying my head in the sand here Smash. I'm not some union worker assuming that the gravy will never stop. I know exactly what the demands are in the business I work in. I also know exactly what demands the business world makes on people in my profession. I can state with absolute certainty that while some bean counters may talk about outsourcing higher end IT work out, it simply wont happen on any large scale. Not any time soon. Not as long as the bulk of the intellectual work done by US corporations is being done in the US. A company like IBM may even get as far as starting a process like that, but the second that every single group that actually designs anything made by IBM starts screaming at them that they can't move the systems out of the country because it'll slow their work down by even 1% (which would cost something like a million dollars a day to a company like IBM), any savings doing that will rapidly evaporate and the argument will be reversed.


I just really don't think you understand the money issues here. I keep saying this, but you don't get it. Labor costs in IT are tiny compared to the potential loss if IT systems fail. A mid sized corporation (like the one I work for) could save maybe 10 million dollars a year if they moved all their IT folks to India. However, if that results in even a 1% higher downtime rate (I'm not going to get into how we calculate that), they'll lose that 10 million in about a day or two. Labor costs are static and apply to the net gain of a corporation. Revenue loss due to downtime and delay can vary wildly and apply directly to the gross revenue of a company. I have some systems that I maintain that are "rated" at 50k an hour. That's how much revenue we lose every hour those systems are down (in this case specifically it's increased costs due to delays getting materials to a fab site, but it's all the same). I maintain 15 such systems. The math on how significant my salary is in relation to ensuring with absolute certainty that those systems are down for an absolute minimum amount of time should be extremely obvious, even to someone as smart as you. The relative savings moving my job to India is completely insignificant. However, the fact that my office is about 50 feet from the lab where these machines are, and I work at the same time periods as the guys who use these machines to develop and test new chips, and we have an oncall system for off hours, and I live in the same city, and I attend weekly meetings with the developers to plan use and schedule maintainence does have a *huge* effect.


Sure. If you've got a bunch of tape monkeys sitting around scratching their butts and earning a big salary, I could see the arguement for outsourcing. But that's a very small amount of IT work, and most would put that squarely in the "low skilled" segment. I guess only time will tell, but I'm not particularly worried about this trend you seem to see. Also, not that many people in my profession are either. We see the numbers every day. We see how many times our salary we save our companies each year. Heck. I'd estimate that if I added up all the cost savings I've provided to my company (admittedly "on paper") since I've started working here, I've paid for myself about a hundred times over. Yeah. It's kinda funny math, but that's how companies really do costs analysis. I don't care how many "documents" someone finds indicating otherwise, I'll believe it when I actually see it happen.