Is Off-Shoring a National Security Threat? 319
An anonymous reader writes "Should the U.S. government hold developers more responsible for the quality of their code? One top cyber security analyst says more regulations would be a mistake. 'Any attempt to regulate software quality and security simply drives the software industry off-shore for good,' he says. 'Similarly, requiring trusted on-shore production ensures two things: (1) falling behind world progress as we aren't the only smart people and we are a minority, and (2) costs rise in a way that makes on-shore-mandated software cost-uncompetitive on the world market.'"
Yes, but not the U.S. produced code (Score:4, Insightful)
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Simple, tariff any wages paid to offshore developers doing work for US companies. These are already documented by export compliance procedure. Make the corporations pay a 700% tax on foreign wages they pay out. Then all of a sudden US workers start to look attractive again. Prevent the companies from moving out by charging them a 700% tax on goods and services they sell to US citizens.
- If producing code cheaply outside the US i
Re:Yes, but not the U.S. produced code (Score:4, Interesting)
We should fucking COMPETE. We EXPORT commodities and manufactured goods which would make us vulnerable in a trade war.
GERMANY is the fucking size of TEXAS, is the second-largest exporter in the world and has strong unions. It has "socialized medicine", a high standard of living, an excellent education system, and person-for-person is superior to most cultures on the planet.
What's the US excuse for failure? "We need tariffs because we suck"?
If secure code is worth having then the market will deliver it. Those who deserve secure code will PAY for it. Why should the government burden ALL of us with another UNFUNDED MANDATE?
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Subsidize the steel industry!
Oh wait, that already happens [cato.org]
I know your point wasn't to focus on the steel industry and rather the ill-effects of tariffs on trade. The wonders of history [nytimes.com]. It's just ridiculous to me that free-market advocates quote the period pre-WW1 as some golden era of free-trade. Also, isolating Smoot-Hawley as the cause of the Great Depression is an exercise in futility. There were many factors involved in that spectacular mess.
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It doesn't make our cars more expensive
Correct. It just prevents them being made cheaper, and denies US car companies the same level of competitiveness as non-US companies in the global marketplace.
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If people have jobs and can afford to buy things, then maybe it is.
If everything costs twice as much, but you make twice as much, it is level.
And really, have prices fallen that much with outsourcing? Not for the items that are essential.
The problem we have right now is that not enough people have jobs here in the US paying enough to afford the amounts required to live here.
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I never said anything about anything going to the government. I wasn't speaking about government at all.
I was talking about the off shoring phenomena.
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That's funny, because U.S. governments (federal, state and local) employ about 3,809,697 full time and 1,521,698 part time people according to the census [census.gov].
If you're talking about the "stimulus" packages they've been somewhat undersized for the U.S. economy (on the order of 1-2% of GDP). They haven't net created job but have assuredly reduced job losses. The best estimate, is I understand around 1-2 million fewer jobs lost from the parts that actually involved stimulus. On the other hand, the part of the p
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If they've "assuredly" reduced job losses, perhaps we wouldn't have to "estimate" how many were so saved.
Alas, we can't do reproducable science here to find out - there's no way to "stimulate" the economy and "not stimulate" the same economy to see what really happens.
That said, last I looked at the estimates for "jobs saved", almost all of them were state government jobs that wouldn't have been downsized anyway - the
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I guess this means (Score:3)
Outsourcing the CIA to China isn't a go?
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We already outsourced the Presidency, and that seems to be working well.
As well as the economy. China defends it with far more energy than either side of the aisle in Washington DC
Secrecy is not safety (Score:2)
Why would off-shoring increase the risk? It would perhaps be of importance if the risk is related to the secrecy around the development. But if you make your code safe by secrecy, then it is not safe anyway, whether you develop it on-shope or anywhere else in the world. You should always assume that secrets are leaked... Always.
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No, you should always factor in the risk that secrets are leaked. It would be silly to assume that risk is 100%, because it isn't. Many successful closed-source projects prove that.
Re:Secrecy is not safety - your not even on topic (Score:5, Informative)
It is not about secrecy it is about quality.
The VP at SAIC is saying that if the government demands that the software they purchase actually meets some minimum standard of quality then everyone will throw up their hands and quit. Which he feels will cause more software to be handed off to overseas developers who will do even a worse job than has already been done.
This smells very much like GM & Ford complaining that new fuel standards will be a technical impossibility to reach just moments before one of their competitors roll out models to the showroom floor that make the grade.
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Re:Secrecy is not safety (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't just secrecy. It is quality. In india, being a good programmer means getting promoted to management immediately. The only people left to code are those who are failures or newbies. As a result, the quality of code coming from overseas is crap and often broken. They often deliver completely broken code, or code that only works for a small subset of valid inputs, or that has terrible maintainability and performance. Every bit of that code you get back has to be thoroughly vetted and usually scrapped and rewritten from the ground up.
So yes, it definitely increases risk.
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So how is it the "good" programmers in management don't review and stop this broken code?
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There's too much of it. They can't do all the work, and they have to let the crappy programmers learn. Trial by fire.
I know a really excellent Indian programmer that's a project coordinator now over several projects. He works like a madman trying to correct and teach people, but the results are still pretty crappy because he's just one guy. Eventually, he'll burn out.
I'd hire that single guy in a heartbeat. There might also be another one in the dozen or so on the project that doesn't do more harm than
Management review code? (Score:3)
You're kidding, right? Management review code?
Even if the manager is technically astute, their job is the manage, not review code. There should be senior developers doing the reviews, but they're too busy writing code. So the sloppy mess produced by the juniors never gets reviewed.
But even without reviews, testing should be revealing the problems caused by that sloppiness. Unfortunately, I've never heard of an offshore coding company that actually does the testing -- that's usually done in-house by
off-shore code is not that good as it is any ways (Score:2)
and some times it ends up costing more due to delays, poor code, coding to spec only and so on.
also with outsourcing they just get the job done and move on makeing you find some one to fix the code.
Quite right. And the corollary applies (Score:2)
On the other hand, serious attention to regulating software design and deployment might eventually reduce the need for security analysts...
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Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.
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Re:Quite right. And the corollary applies (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually outsourcing their own forces brought the romans to their downfall both the western and eastern empire.
Naah, study your history. That was an effect along the way, but hardly the cause.
The cause was the rich people had all the money land and power. Read your Gibbon, near the end all the land in the empire was owned by only a thousand landlords and everyone else was dirt poor. Kind of like where the USA is headed. When Rome was more egalitarian, Rome the city produced 25K fighting men, which means a total army size in those days of about 75K. Back then individuals paid for their own gear when they volunteered for service...
Once only the rich had money, the poor couldn't even volunteer to be the equivalent of cannon fodder, and the rich had to hire foreign mercenaries, at ripoff prices. Toward the end, the average Roman was so poor that the empire could barely raise 100K fighting men. You'd think an empire could raise more than 4x just one city, but they had economically destroyed themselves, so...
Translation (Score:2)
People aren't willing to pay extra for code that's actually secure so we can't pass along our costs, and you can kiss our ass if you think we're taking a pay cut just because our software killed a few hundred people.
The argument is stupid ... (Score:3)
First, we already have a market framework that works - people don't buy or use the crappiest code when given a choice.
Second, you know that "disclaim all warranties" bit? If you paid for the product, the vendor cannot disclaim warranties - so you have more incentive to deal with someone local so you can sue their *** off a lot easier. Given enough lawsuits, all bugs are shallow.
Third - the government is unable to ensure the quality of the code it already buys - how is it going to do that for everyone?
The whole concept is dumb, the article is just troll bait - which explains why it was posted on Troll Tuesday [tt]
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<div class="sarcasm">Well, that explains Windows' success in the presence of alternatives perfectly.</div>
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People have always had alternatives ... they make the choice based on several things, including price. Back when others were running MS/DOS or PC/DOS on a 8086/8088 I was running Microware OS9. Others were running something from some company called Apple.
Today, i
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Windows won because it was absolutelly best product at the time.
Uh, no. Windows won because it was the cheapest product that got the job done. Windows was a toy compared to Unix and pretty poor compared to MacOS, but it worked and it was a fraction of the price.
Oh, and I was running Linux on my laptop in 1996 developing my web site while I traveled; Windows 95 wouldn't even boot on such a low-end system, let alone run a web server and web browser and CGI scripts.
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I'm sometimes amused.
We'll probably see a lot of this kind of proposal. Ultimately, it has to do with jobs. Why not bypass all the bullshit and just admit we're not willing to deal with globalization?
Say what you want about the 'market', most of the economy is government run today... either directly or heavily regulated to the point of being government run. healthcare, education, military, law, financial...
So why do people like yourself sit there pretending like we have a free market and ultimately hurti
Well... (Score:2)
Yes. (Score:2)
Enforcing high quality secure software written in the U.S. would be bad for the U.S. Quality and security have always been bad for a company. eg. DEC and SUN It stands to reason it would be bad for the U.S.
ITAR (Score:3)
ITAR [wikipedia.org] is perhaps one of the biggest hidden costs in domestic software development. Investments in s/w products that cannot realize the maximum ROI due to market restrictions force quite a bit of development overseas. If my subsidiary in India can sell my app or service anywhere in the world, but I can't do so with a domestic version, guess where I'll send the work?
Its like when Obama was elected and all the gun nuts got paranoid about possible forthcoming regulations. Everyone ran out and stocked up on guns and ammo. Mention national security and software in the same article and more development work will get pushed overseas in a panic.
Offshoring IS a threat (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a threat that will eventually bring down every company that does it. It is a cheat, a dodge used to avoid paying market rate for wages while still depending on the market you are taking the jobs away from to remain strong enough to buy your product (which is likely too expensive to sell in the off shore market where you are underpaying for labor).
Ergo: Every company that uses offshoring depends on EVERYONE ELSE to not do the same so that there is still a market for their product. Eventually everyone will offshore in order to not get undercut in price, to the point where Americans no longer make a wage sufficient to keep the economy afloat so that there is sufficient money in the economy to allow the purchase of the offshored product.
In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.
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Not off-shoring is also a self-destructive strategy. It's just a matter of time before foreign companies can compete on complete products.
In the end, the only way to survive is to remain competitive with foreign workers.
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How can that happen?
Will BOA reduce my mortgage to numbers similar to China/India/? Will the grocery store reduce their prices? And the other stores I have to buy things from to keep alive? I can do things to reduce how much I need to live on to some degree, but there is a bottom to it all. And their bottom is lower than ours.
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Get rid of H1B visas, if you want to work in America, become a citizen.
So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.
I read an interesting book a couple of years back which argued that empires grew large by being open and allowing the 'best and brightest' from around the world to move to the imperial hub where they provided the most benefit to the empire. Then at some point they closed the doors and soon after the empire collapsed. I'
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So the people who would have moved to America to work for US Software, Inc and paid US taxes instead stay in their country and start up Cheaper Than US Software, Inc and the jobs move abroad.
H1B isn't a path to US citizenship. It's a means for undercutting the domestic wages while holding the foreign worker in a position where displeasing their employer can lead to being deported. We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.
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Not to mention the fraud and abuse involved with H1B would put Solyndra and "Fast and Furious" to shame. I once worked at a company that started bringing in H1B's.
They are required to CLAIM that they are paying prevailing market wages to the H1B employee. They never do. One guy they brought in, they claimed was being paid $50K/year. He was actually making less than half that.
Who could he complain to? He'd be deported if he did. This paperwork is NEVER audited by government either.
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We want the best and brightest of the world to become US citizens, not indentured servants.
So how does someone become a US Citizen in a few months?
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There's no clear formula. Russia pumped education so now they have a bunch of massively educated people working mundane jobs. We crapped on education and now we have way too many people for some tech jobs and not enough for others. Who can say what the actual answer is?
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The biggest reform we need (besides the slave wage H1B) is that we need to start considering the labor and environmental regulations of countries that products are imported from and labor is offshore to.
It is unfair for American business and industry to have the competitive DISADVANTAGE of our environmental and labor laws while products and services produced in places where producers can belch black smoke at will and pay far below American market rates for labor can be freely imported. There should be tari
Re:Offshoring IS a threat (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, it's ultimately a self-destructive strategy that will end in dragging down first world markets to third world economic levels. We may already be past that critical point, looking at the perpetual recession we are in.
It's what most of that first world is built on, getting ridiculously cheap labor intensive imports from abroad while exporting expensive high tech and processed products back. Except the world isn't stupid and the world isn't standing still. As the rest of the world gets civilized, they do get educated. They too understand high tech. Americans aren't magical just because they're born in the US, the rest of the world is catching up. You can close off the borders, but that market isn't coming back. Then it'd just be the US economy, no almighty dollar which is worth so much around the world. That dollar was - is - worth so much because there's valuable things to be bought for dollars. Close off trade, take that away and you might find yourself with a third world currency bringing US wages down to match the rest of the world all the same. Either way they're starting to match the US and you can't just stick your head in the sand about that.
It definitely is, but so is outsourcing (Score:2)
An not only "national security" (never understood that particular US fetish), but a threat to data and software security in any environment. But so is outsourcing in the first place. Off-Shoring just makes the connection between customer and service-provider even more remote. The more remote this connection is, the less loyalty and less perception (and often reality) of the risk of repercussions. Add a cultural gap to make matters worse. And an often high fluctuation.
Incidentally, from what I have seen, Out
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Not that I assume the 100 developers were on this full-time
Unless you had your own guys looking over their shoulder, how do you know that? Look up "overbilling fraud".
So.. we'll work for 1/20 their wages... We could bill honestly and make 1/20th their profits, a nice honest sum. But... what if we billed them ten times over? Faked the whole thing? We'll make 10 times 1/20th equals half their profit, much better. Whoo hoo! We can't get caught because we're private contractors and you shouldn't be directly supervising us and we're on the other side of the planet
What will drive US companies out of the US? (Score:2)
Wrong approach, where it's used not made. (Score:2)
If it is used in the US, a US dipomatic site (which is technically US soil), or a US military base (also technically US soil) mandate software quality. No matter where it is made. The US is such a large market it would force other countries to do this.
This next paragraph sort of expands on the Subratik's post.
And has anyone considered that competing with countries with cheap labor and resources, e.g. China, is a recipe for disaster for the US? There are two approaches, go cheap like China because you can or
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or [the US could] compete on quality like the Germans
Does that mean the US will get to impose hundreds of anti-dumping duties on Chinese imports like Germany?
EU extends China anti-dumping duty for barium carbonate [indmin.com]
EU levies stiff anti-dumping tariffs [on ceramic tiles] [chinadaily.com.cn]
Chinese exporters regret EU anti-dumping duties on Chinese-made screws, bolts [xinhuanet.com]
Germany's SolarWorld expects anti-dumping complaints vs China [vancouversun.com]
EU Hits China with Anti-Dumping Duties on Paper [e-to-china.com]
EU greenlights anti-dumping duties on Chinese light bulbs [eubusiness.com]
EU Extended Anti-Dumping Duties on Chinese Bicycle Impo [e-to-china.com]
Can we 'win on quality'? (Score:2)
Well, it seems that a lot of corporate managers have bought into the notion that software inherently sucks. But it doesn't have to be that way. What if the US were to establish itself as the place to go for -quality software-, software that worked and that US companies stood behind? There are probably many comparisons with other industries; the auto industry comes to mind with German and Swedish cars recognized for higher quality engineering at a higher price. (That's not to denigrate the substantial qua
Professionalism & lack of standards vs Get it (Score:5, Insightful)
During the banking crisis, people in the US and the UK heard this a lot about the financial sector -- if you regulate them too much, they'll just move somewhere without regulations. I think there's some truth to that, but I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment.
One of the things I'm all for is professionalism in the IT world. Computers have been around for a long time, and now they're 100% vital to peoples' daily lives. It's time to start thinking about a couple of things:
- Separating the design and deployment portions of the IT landscape
- Making the design part a real branch of the engineering profession, with a set of educational standards
- Making the deployment part a skilled trade, with the necessary apprenticeships and career progression to attract new hires
Having a professional body would allow us to stand up to employers who demand that the schedule be crunched once again to meet an arbitrary date. No one tells a licensed PE who is liable for work they sign off on that they just lost a week of design time because someone said so...PEs are aware that they could lose their license or be sued out of existence. Currently, software isn't considered infrastructure, and so projects aren't run like bridge construction...they're arbitrary, and not grounded in reality.
The problem is that the field of IT is very broad. You have systems guys like me, network guys, software developers, deployment experts, hardware engineers -- it's all over the map. One thing I don't like about the current state of our profession is a lack of training standards. We leave a lot of training up to vendors like Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, IBM, etc. who have a vested interest in selling product and training a generation of newbies to use their technology. You also have a lot of independent IT people who have no desire to associate with a larger body of professionals, and wouldn't want the responsibility that professional status gives them. Even with the liability, I would be happy to be the equivalent of a PE because (a) I do good work, and (b) I'm well aware of what I don't know, and ask other professionals for help when needed. Other people in our field want nothing to do with this...they like the idea of being a cowboy coder or cowboy sysadmin and flying by the seat of their pants. Professionalism would also mean slowing down, realizing what works in terms of systems design, not trying to reinvent things every 6 months, etc. The laws of physics and properties of fluid dynamics don't change much -- techniques are introduced gradually in other branches of engineering. In our world, it's "new programming language", "new design pattern", "new OS", "new hardware design" every few years, and often it's just a rehash of what's come before.
The other problem, and the one that this article addresses, is that other countries are probably not willing to commit to playing by the same rules if we adopted them. In fact, there would be a huge uptick in business at "Joe's Code Shack" because they would promise unreasonably short turnaround times and just throw labor at the problem. It's not really a national security issue -- the root cause is that no one is willing to pay for proper engineering work and they just want things faster and faster for less money.
I think that a lot of specialized industries are starting to figure out what they can offshore and what just doesn't work when it comes back. I do systems integration work, and I have seen first-hand the disasters that come back from the "code monkeys" when there are no specs and bad oversight. It's not a cost savings if you have to hire a US contractor at 4x the rate of an FTE to wade through the mess and make it maintainable. One problem is that a lot of industries see IT is "grunt work" coding that people don't necessarily notice when it's done poorly. Anyone working for a large multinational who offshores development is probably well versed in things like internal web applications that crash
What's with this love of "Engineer"? (Score:2)
There is nothing special about engineering education that makes it "better" than a computer science degree from another department at a university. In fact, if you shift the courses to engineering, students will end up wasting their time on a lot of physics and math classes required for basic engineering that are completely useless for programming.
The other problem is that engineering is standardized. There are "rules" for how to con
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I can't imagine every company loves the idea of operating in a completely unregulated environment
One of the most important features of regulation is to keep the big corps big and grind the small ones out of profitability... I can't see a big slow lumbering dilbertian horror of a company loving the idea of not having regulation expenses to crush their smaller competitors.
Why the developers? (Score:2)
After all with the recent cases of tainted products coming from China no-one worried about the person making the item it was the fault of the company importing it that had legal problems.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?! (Score:2)
I really question the motives that allow America's wealth to be drained in one way or another to the amount of a Billion dollars a week to other countries. I question the motive of the statement, "Manufacture or Service it in <country
Maybe right, tiring hoplessness (Score:2)
I know that often these kinds of analyses can be right: imposing too many restrictions can hurt an industry.
However, sometimes these things just turn into hopeless naysaying. The government can't create any law or regulation without someone complaining that it will destroy the economy. Yes, having laws against lead-based paint in children's toys probably hurts some profits, causes some economic efficiency and "hurts the economy" in some ways. Sometimes that kind of economic efficiency isn't the most imp
Doh! (Score:2)
Actually (Score:2)
Going around asking "Is X a National Security Threat" is the biggest security threat of them all. In fact, the very concept of National Security is a security threat.
no equivocating (Score:3)
Yes. This is a national security threat. By definition. You can't have it both ways. Sorry globalists. You can't bully and exploit third-world labor, and then trust them with your proprietary industrial secrets. They will steal them from you, and turn around and use them against you. Period.
The only exception - I guess, is that muslims probably will not use complex interest-derived financial instruments to enslave you, since usury is against islamic law. Straight-up slavery, is not though. So keep on bleeding your own economy until they come over here and take-over. They will be happy to enslave your sons and daughters.
World Trade Organization issue (Score:3)
No, but it's.... (Score:2)
...an awful example of gerundification. "Off-shoring" ? What a horrible word. It probably shouldn't have a hyphen, either, as that could lead to even more confusion over its intended meaning.
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This.
One of the largest cable companies in the US used to offshore their network design. They ended up paying "us" (as in my employer & other companies that work in the same field) to redo all of it & they no longer outsource design.
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Like playing WoW and posting on Slashdot. Oh no, the foreigners play WoW too, and post on Slashdot as well! They're taking our jerbs!
Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector. (Score:2)
No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses....let them do as best as they can in the market.
To encourage jobs IN the US, however, I'd say the Feds could lower taxes to corporations, for every documented US citizen they hire to give incentive and make it easier to hire US citizens.
However, for Federal contracts, ESPECIALLY those coding for DoD, NASA, etc...they should be mandated to use ONLY US citizens...which they generally do anyway since mo
Re:Regs for federal jobs...but not private sector. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses
Yes we should let them utilize child labor because, hey, the market *knows* best.
Tax Cuts for staying on shore are *exactly* the same as penalties for going offshore. Seriously, how is it any different? The latter means you have more revenue available. The former means you have less revenue available. That's not a plan forward that's a plan to spiral downward.
the last decade has clearly shown that tax cuts do *not* stimulate the economy. If they did, why are we still in a recession? Why did we have the lowest job growth period in the last few decades during the time taxes were the lowest in 50 years?
Corporate Tax cuts do *not* work. Stimulus on the other hand actively puts money into the economy. Tax cuts just put it in companies pockets and then you *hope* they spend it. We've seen they aren't spending it, so why give them more?
Nobody is going to hire new workers until there is enough demand. It doesn't matter what the tax rate is. If there isn't enough demand, they'll just pocket that tax cut which doesn't help anyone and only adds to the deficit. Better to spend money on stimulus and get money circulating through the economy and creating demand.
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> If we cut a trillion dollars out of the economy, that's
> actual money that isn't in the economy.
That's Monopoly money (largely unprinted) that isn't in the economy, Mr. Keynes.
Conjure up as much as you'd like, but you'll only postpone and increase the pain. Exponential functions (like our national debt) go on forever in pure mathematics, but not so much in the finite physical world.
We can choose from two kinds of pain; the pain of discipline, or the pain of regret. We (and our predecessors) have c
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Well, I'd say the answer is "it depends".
No, there shouldn't be any requirements for private businesses....let them do as best as they can in the market.
To encourage jobs IN the US, however, I'd say the Feds could lower taxes to corporations, for every documented US citizen and legal resident they hire to give incentive and make it easier to hire US citizens and legal residents
There, fixed for you. The problem is not US citizens hiring vs offshore hiring, but one of
1. hiring numbers - within US soil- of people already (and legally) in US soil vs
2. hiring numbers outside US soil (or worse, the premeditate and systematic preference of H1 visas over US workers, for US jobs, in US soil!).
We do not want to put artificial burdens on private businesses. After all, what is a manufacturer to do? Hire an assembly line worker that puts a head on a doll for $0.50/hr in China vs the sa
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National security?
What do you need to secure? What is the threat?
"Were safe! No food, no jobs, no shelter, but we CANNOT be attacked!"
Can't tell if a lost attempt at humor, or just stupid.
Paying our enemies (Score:4, Interesting)
-Note, I live in the USA, I get that you might not. Ignore the "we" in those cases.
Off-shoring becomes a bit of a problem if you decide you want to fight a war with one of the countries you offshore to.
For example, if we would start a war with India, one of the first things that would happen is the loss of all communication with that country. How many businesses would fail since they wouldn't be able to replace that infrastructure quickly.
How about if we go to war with China? Can we produce all of the parts we currently use in our weapons systems here, quickly?
Yes, in both examples, the USA would be able to eventually produce everything it might need, but it would take years to regain the infrastructure that currently isn't located here.
Where things get really complex is when you consider the off-shoring of natural resources, such are rare metals or oil. If the USA pissed everyone off, it wouldn't have enough resources to maintain current standards of living & fight a war, even with all of the imaginary money it can print.
All of the above could be seen as a positive, though. Maybe if the idea of killing others isn't enough to stop war, the cold facts of logistical interdependence might.
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So your argument is that given enough time you are going to start a war with every other country. Not just have a war but start a war with every single other country.
You have bigger problems than offshoring.
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Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.
Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.
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Don't be any stupider than you have to be. Wars happen. You don't have to start a war to be in one.
Wars may become less likely because economies become interdependent. But they may not. If someone decides they can get even more favorable situations by defeating their rivals and wringing concessions out of them, that someone may still start a war.
In civilised parts of the world that is generally not true. Instead of going in with guns blazing we negotiate and trade.
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So your argument is that given enough time you are going to start a war with every other country.
Looking at recent history, the answer would appear to be a solid 'yes'.
Re:Paying our enemies (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason that Germany and Japan didn't win WW2, other than having Italy drag them down and open up another front of attack, is US industrial production. Before we entered the war, we were able to supply Britain and Russia. When we entered the war, we could out-produce everyone. Imagine if we were heavily dependent on China, Taiwan, etc for production of good back then? We'd be stuck -- not because we were at war with them, but because Japan was and had them cut off. You have to think about that, too. Anything that threatens your supply chain threatens you and will, eventually, lead to loss of life. That's just how it works,
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Isn't that why GM was bailed out, to keep the industrial capacity in the US?
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Isn't that why GM was bailed out, to keep the industrial capacity in the US?
You think that if GM had been broken up the Chinese would have packed up the factories and shipped them to China?
GM was bailed out because Obama needs those union votes.
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I wasn't talking about the last time specifically, I meant in general, why GM gets bailed out when they're building a labor-intensive product in the country with the most expensive labor.
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War is basically a dressed-up excuse for one nation to steal wholesale from another anyway. I can't see the downside.
But what I can see a downside to is the hollowing-out of economies based on wage disparity. That will even out eventually. After that, offshoring will
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The more trade you have the less of a chance that some country feels so screwed by everyone else that they start a war.
That was also the plan before WWI, wasn't it?
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That's why international investors wanted open borders and the elimination of trade barriers - it's well known that countries with strong trade links are far less likely to go to war with each other over resources. California hasn't gone to war with New York or Texas, and UK hasn't gone to war with Germany for over 65 years now.
Now when some countries start putting restrictions on the export of rare metals used for dual-purpose technology, then you have to wonder...
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The dirty work IS the important stuff.
Re:Nah (Score:5, Funny)
so you wouldn't mind outsourcing your girlfriend to me for a warmup, as long as you get her back wet and ready for you to focus on important stuff?
Sure, you can take her shopping.
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Looks like someone hasn't read up on the economic history of post-war Japan.
Or, say, Norway.
Or Germany.
Or... etc. etc.
It's easy to say government is never the answer--simple, clean, fits on a bumper sticker. It's also wrong.
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I guess Germans and Japanese really are a master races then, doing better than Americans even with more government. Because, after all, you asserting that they would do even better with less government is all that's needed prove it.
Yes, but you see, that's the genius of strong government: government is worse than private indust
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I guess Germans and Japanese really are a master races then, doing better than Americans even with more government.
You are aware that:
1. Japan is in the middle of a demographic decline and few Americans would want to live the way the average Japanese citizen does? That's not even taking into account the high level of homelessness last time I was there.
2. The Germans, thanks to their wonderful big government, are facing a choice between massively increasing taxes to bail out the rest of the Euro zone or seeing the Euro and probably the EU collapse around them?
The current crisis was caused by big government and looks incr
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The current crisis was caused by big government and looks increasingly likely to take down big government throughout the West. Yet the solution is apparently more and bigger government?
Dude, how can you free-market right-wingers spin everything around so much that you dare to make these claims, contradicting the most blatant reality? Do you take courses on bullshit?
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So, the big governments failed because they gave the banks what they wanted to screw us over? If the governments were any strong they would stand up to the banks, wouldn't they? And your solution is even less government?
Don't you get it? In spite what all the free-market looneys have been preaching for decades, a weak State does not spend less money. Precisely the opposite. A weak State falls easy prey to the big economic powers, and these use it to funnel more money from the people into their pockets. M
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China seems to be doing fine so more and bigger government may work.
China is a basket case whose primary selling point is that it doesn't have the kind of obstructive government regulations that every Western nation does; or, at least, where it does have those regulations they can simply be ignored. Where it's been successful it's because the government has kept out of the way, and right now it's heavily reliant on US consumers, wages are rising enough that manufacturers are moving production to cheaper nations and much of the money they've made has gone into what is probably the world's largest housing bubble.
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"The outsourcing is a good thing in this case, it saves the ability of certain businesses to produce without paying the artificially high costs imposed by US gov't regulations and taxation and subsidies to monopolies"
Except that 70% of the us economy is Americans buying things. How can they do that when the jobs have been exported?
For a while, it might seem good, but who here are they going to sell to when enough us consumers lose their jobs?
It isnt the regulations and taxations that are killing the US eco
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It isnt the regulations and taxations that are killing the US economy, it is the lack of decent jobs.
Which is due to regulation and taxation. Who'd want to set up a new business in a high-tax, high-regulation nation? Who'd want to expand their business if most of the extra income would just go to the government in new taxes?
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Is sometimes better than the alternatives does not mean is always the greatest thing ever and is always perfect.
Also, protip: history is more than the last 10-20 years.
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The late 19th century as America's golden age, even in a strictly economic sense? Well, at least now I know you're trolling. Have fun with the rest of the fish.
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Nope. The problem is described in my journal, it's simple, it's gov't destroying productivity of Americans by destroying the capital savings, which is also the reason that the market now is a casino with people not investing but gambling [slashdot.org].
Greed is the only incentive that is real that moves progress forward. The real problem is greed in government, which grows government at the expense of the real economy.
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No amount of regulation is going to stop that short of tariffs and that will start a trade war that at this point we might lose.
If we've already lost our economy, what have we got to lose in a trade war?
Seriously... Think about it. Compare and contrast a deep permanent depression vs losing a nice short little trade war. Do not look at the effect on the rich, they'll always be OK anyway. Look at the effect on the median citizen.
So in a trade war, our military would have to go to the middle east to seize oil producing assets... oh wait we're already doing that, not gonna run out of oil. In a trade war, our factories exports would