Humm, I bet if I investigated you your income comes from big business. You never mentioned how outsourcing is good for our economy other than it benefits the big corporations and takes jobs away from Americans. You are a idiot.

Outsourcing is good in one way. It furnishes the dollar stores. Our spendable income here in America is way down, so the only stores that people can afford to buy in are dollar stores and discount stores.
Because Americans pay is way down. Outsourcing is not good. It takes away jobs here in the US. Not everyone can afford college degrees.

Prove to me in statistics instead of your mouth that outsourcing is good. I want to see the figures. Are Americans spendable power up? Are wages up? Are more Americans employed now than ten years ago? Are wages up?

: You are a idiot

could be worse dan, you might have been nidiot, now they are stupid!

ok, i'm off to wash my face with some raw eggs...

Debbie, Americans have always been taught to "believe in the marketplace". That is, Do not regulate business and any "inefficiencies" will work themselves out by people finding new opportunities (new jobs, new industries). There are no shortage of theoretical models that will show this is true.

And if an economist digs deep enough, he/she can find data to support their theories: more often than not, in the long run, people are indeed better off.

But I agree with you on two things:

1) Economics doesn't show particularly well the pain that occurs during these transitions -- before you get to "the long run". The US used to be primarily a manufacturing country, and now we are more a services country. That means (for example) that people who lost their jobs at Ford went back to school and ended up being web designers -- and making more money than before.

But try to tell that to the ex-Ford guy before he finds a new job that all this makes for a more efiicient economy and he'd answer like you did above.

2) We are just at the beginning of the latest "transition" and its a doozie: the Detroit Ford job went first to Mexico and now China. The guy who became a web designer is back in school because he discovered he has to compete with much cheaper web designers in India. And there are no guarantees for his next profession. In the end everyone's income is supposed to rise (and thus far always has), but I think eventually the dams will slowly give in and there will be a leveling off of income around the world: as the Chinese make more money, Americans will make less.

St. James,
The problem is that the theory is there, and the benefits to the top 1% of the people in our economy are measurable. But the supposed benefits to the entire "economy" never seem to be quite there, or to really be measurable at all. And somehow the disbenefits to the lower 2/3 of the polity never quite get the attention or measurement that the theory says they should get. Never mind the supposed political redistribution of wealth which all the textbooks say "could" be used to ameloriate the disbenefits; that is never even on the table.

Look: the point of the US economy is to provide happiness and good lives to _the citizens of the United States_. Not to use operations research techniques to maximze the size of the
"World Economy" nor to maximize the function Payout_to_Upper_Class(trade, layoffs, human_misery). Optimization of the good lives of US citizens might will result in suboptimal levels of profit or even world wealth, but that is the way it goes: the point of operations research is to identify the desired outcome and maximize that. Not the squeeze as much as possible out of the earth for theoretically reasons.

Cranky

I've been a bear so long I can't stand it anymore. And yet bubbles grow and burst and the economy remains strong with unemployment down. I have learned that the US economy is so gargantuan it can take beating after beating after beating (real estate bubble, unbelievable trade and current account deficits, crazy wars, no friends left on the world stage, a moronic president, money dropping from helicopters, peak oil, etc.) and all of these simultaneously or in rapid succession, and ... nada.

THAT is the sign of one frickin' powerful economy.

But the supposed benefits to the entire "economy" never seem to be quite there, or to really be measurable at all.

I dunno about that.

I remember what life was like back in the 1970s, things are a lot better now. People make more money, and lots of things that were insanely expensive back then seem cheap to anyone who remembers what they used to cost.... and everything seems to be higher quality, too.

I think the problem is that these changes happen so incrementally that it's difficult to notice... but they are happening.

Never mind the supposed political redistribution of wealth which all the textbooks say "could" be used to ameloriate the disbenefits; that is never even on the table.

If that's what you think is going to solve the problem, I suggest taking an in-depth look at how command economies have fared historically.

Political re-distribution of wealth is not the solution. Besides that, as someone observed a long time ago, when the politicans are the ones who decide who gets what and how much, the first thing to be bought are politicians.

It doesn't even have to be a capitalist system for it to happen, as the Chinese are learning.