It is discouraging to see how impossible it remains to have an honest political dialog on trade. Clinton and Obama are now beating the anti-NAFTA drums because they are in Ohio. Obama criticizes Clinton for supporting NAFTA; she says she was always “critical” of it. Both candidates are intelligent, highly-educated people who probably understand the complexity of the issues–but you can’t equivocate in front of a bunch of people who lost their jobs to China. You can’t lecture steelworkers about how maybe their careers are obsolete and they should go become web developers or something.
People want change…but they don’t want difficult change. Difficult change is recognizing that if you want to be able to go buy a car for $15,000 and drive everywhere, then:
- We need cheap labor to build cheap cars. You can’t pay people union wages and expect to produce inexpensive cars. And really, you can’t have our super-expensive health care system either–a greater cost to auto manufacturers than the raw materials in the vehicles. If you want that cheap car, then you need what developing nations provide: cheap, disposable labor.
- We need cheap oil to let us drive those cars. So we need to control the Middle East as best we can. It’s easier to let thousands of our young people volunteer to go die in Iraq than to alter our lifestyles fundamentally so that oil is less relevant.
Now those sentiments above are what gets you <1% of the vote. And they are simplistic, liberal, cynical quips that really don’t solve anything. So in the political debate, it really does come down to a contest of trying to convince voters you do care about them without appearing to pander too much.
The reason I like Obama is that I see something different in his whole approach that gives me faith he can help us through the changes. We can’t expect a perfect answer because the answer is something we need to navigate towards incrementally. Voters are right to think that talk of “retraining” or whatever is just BS. But how the candidates talk about these issues gives insight into their values and ultimately, that is what matters, not specific positions or a grand plan for the future…
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Maybe that’s why so many corporations have outsourced to India and China. I read a really neat article about this on http://tothecenter.com/
That’s because there are many benefits of outsourcing. Getting access to high-quality services at a cost-effective price is the biggest benefit that you can get with outsourcing.
That’s why most companies resort to offshore outsourcing. Since manpower in general is cheaper in other countries, outsourcing jobs leads to lesser overhead costs. No need to hire and train new people.
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