The Outsourcing Blues

So now we have a Democratic Senator of a rapidly emerging purple state deciding that laying off American workers is a great thing:

U.S. Senator Max Baucus, the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, said Friday he supports the outsourcing of white-collar jobs to low-wage countries such as India - a position at odds with his party's traditional stance on the issue.

Baucus insisted a majority of fellow Senate Democrats agreed with him, despite the party's longtime opposition to American companies moving jobs overseas.

"Everybody is concerned about job losses and so am I," he told The Associated Press in an interview in Bangalore, his first stop on an five-day tour of India.

"But the world is flat and we must work harder to better retrain our people," rather than resist outsourcing, he said. "Offshoring is a fact of globalization. Opportunities for U.S. companies come from everywhere - including India."

Of all the books to read, Baucus had to pick up Tom Friedman's. Ugh.

I have no doubt that Washington Democrats agree with him on this. I could give them the addresses and phone numbers of about 20 million workers that disagree. The world is flat because we flattened our own manufacturing base. We did it knowingly and willingly. We were eager to keep multinational corporations besotted with cheap labor, and we thought we could lift up the world from poverty by giving them our cheap manufacturing jobs. Didn't work out that way. Poor countries are still poor countries, only now they're being exploited by multinationals, who without government oversight can now offer slave wages with impunity. US manufacturing workers were never retrained, no matter what Baucus says about "working harder." We never gave a thought to incenting American companies to compete in America. Those companies that try it are penalized by soaring healthcare costs. We received nary a tax boost, a lightening to our aid burden overseas, really nothing. All we got was this lousy $1.98 T-shirt... that cost two cents to make.

When I say "we" I mean the whole government, by the way, Democrats and Republicans. In 1979 my father, a textile manufacturer, lobbied Congress on this very issue, and was told basically that the US was going to pull up stakes in their industry for the sake of world peace. Since then the world has been more violent than ever.

A country without a manufacturing base, a country that doesn't produce, that only consumes, will not be able to last economically. We're falling dangerously into that category.