Outsourcing is the biggest thing killing our economy right now. (US economy that is).
It is not just a factor of cheap labor. It is the first step in losing all of our big companies. If all the workers are overseas what is the point in having managers here? If all the managers are overseas what is the point in having a board here? People are not just exporting other people's jobs they are exporting whole industries.
A second aspect on this is that we really don't make anything here in the US any more. If all our ports were shut down for even a few months much of America would come to a screaching halt. We would have empty shelves and no replacement parts. So for the last 20 years we've traded on information and technical ability. Both of those are now in dire risk. The slashing of R&D budgets combined with oursourcing means we will literally be out of the information and technology business. Most of the major software in use today started from a programmer who was employed full time writing code for another company. Not by employees of companies like Microsoft who merely steal or buy the software. If these programmers cannot make a living writing code they do not sharpen their coding skills to write the next great inovations in software. The majority of Open source programmers are employed as programmers for companies, some even use some company time on open source projects. So this outsourcing threatens both our comercial and free software markets. If Western programmers are not hacking out code for a living it will be Indian, Chinese and Russian coders writing the next Oracle, the next great game, the next whatever is needed down the road. It is they who will have the expereince and expertise not us.
IT and the net were saviours to our broken economy in the 80s. The 90s we flourished mostly because of an ineffectual series of presidents and the boom in IT. This boom triggered so many ripples in the US economy that many service industries are now coupled to IT and high tech. As the jobs flow overseas these jobs will dry up as well as the information workers creating even less demand for what we still produce here in the US.
As for tarrifs they have to be enacted now. If we wait another 5 years it will be too late. Too much of our knowledge base will be outside of our control and our talent will have been religated to the dust heap. This is a major ecnomic crisis which severe impacts for everyone in the nation. The tent cities so many have forgotten will return in the near future if we continue to outsource.
Illegal imigrants are a major problem. Nowhere as big as outsourcing. What is happening is that when everybody went to information management it created openings for imigrants in trades and other semi-skilled jobs. So today a night stocker, a construction work are now working for wages dictated by what people can pay illegal imigrants. Our entire wage scale and standard of living is being decimated by the sheer numbers of illegals we have here and the entrenched structure they have built. Once a job falls into Illegal's hands is very difficult for American's to get on those crews. If they do an American cannot live on those wages without living in the poverty ridden life of an illegal. Many displaced information workers looking to return to previous proffesions are no blocked by illegals. The true unemployment rate, not the joke perpetrated by the Gov is rapidly rising. To aggravate this so many that have ducked into education over the last five years will be graduating to deep debt and no jobs. People with handicaps or strikes on their records will become long term unemployable as the compitition has risen so steeply for what jobs exist. Those that lose a job are often looking at 1-2 years of seeking to find a job that pays a fraction of their previous wages and they feel lucky if they find work in their same field.
Legislation and environment are two factors that hurt employment. Many nations will happly wreck the environment to get the jobs and income. So by forcing the jobs over seas then buying those products which pollute far worse than American factories we've actually increased the harm to the environment but we shifted it out of sight for now. It'll come back to haunt the whole world eventually. Russia, the US, UK, etc have paid a heavy price for industrialization. The price will be heavier for those that ignore our mistakes.
Taxes, the conflict between biz and consumer help send companies overseas. The logic of taxing business is beyond me. It is like that money will magically come out of nowhere. It comes from the consumers. Companies are in biz to make a profit. If taxes affect that margion they will just raise prices or do something to evade those taxes. If we quit taxing business we will see more jobs. Yes business will just pocket some but realistically almost all of corporate taxation is passed on to the consumer. Why not make up for it in the extra jobs and create measures that encourage job growth rather than discourage it?
Automation has little to do with modern enemployment in the US as so little is still manufactured here. In fact automation is an opportunity to bring factories back to the US.
Right now many of the big corps are headquartered in the West or in Asian nations like Japan. More and more Korea and Japan are losing to China while the West is losing business to India and china. The net result is that these corporations are more and more likely to be lured to other nations. Tarrifs will mean little since we can import from nation A or nation B but we long ago lost the abiliity to make it here. Keeping a HQ in the high cost high taxastion areas of the West will make less and less sense. Stockholders already mortgage the future for a quick diviend return. What would moving the company HQ do to phase them ?
We need a much stronger respose. We need strong encouragements to make stuff here. Encouragements like requiring all Gov purchases to be of American made products. Incentives to bring work back to the US. Encouragement toward small biz and innovation. We need a huge overhaul of OSHA which no longer protects workers but happily extorts cash from companies.