RedPhoenixxxxxx wrote:
It's not. The two of them are not necessarily related. Real wages have actually gone down since 2001 in most "modern industrial nations". The ones doing better are the very rich and the very poor. The middle class is not, and they are the onse being squeezed.
Ok. But is that due to outsourcing? Or some other factor? When you say "most modern industrial nations", which ones specifically are you talking about? Have real wages gone down for the middle class in the US? France? The UK? Spain? Because there are other factors at work then just outsourcing. I'd typically argue that it's not just that a nation is "modern" and "industrial", but that it also allows capitalism to function correctly in order for that relationship to work. But then I'd have to repeat one of my long diatribes about how high government taxes ultimately hurt the middle class instead of the wealthy that they are ostensibly aimed at.
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Most menail jobs can't be taken abroad. You can't take a toilet's cleaner's job to India. Ot the guy flipping burgers at MacDo.
However, most jobs above the menial category can be taken abroad, and a lot of them are.
Again. While there's a whole lot of talk about outsourcing, there's very little data to support that supposition that it has the kind of impact on jobs that you are implying. At least here in the US, it's more or less a wash. We outsource some jobs. We "insource" some jobs (how many people in the US work for Sony, or Toyota for example...?). The overall impact is pretty minimal and some argue that outsourcing in principle isn't a problem, it's a matter of how attractive your employment laws are to businesses that matters.
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I do agree this has very litle to do with the President, though.
Sure. But if the economy was in the toilet, you can bet people would blame Bush (heck, there's another thread right now where some are trying to do that by creating a measurement to show the economy's doing poorly!). While I agree that presidents typically have only a small overall impact on the economy as a whole, they do tend to get blamed or praised based on the performance of the economy during their terms. How many times have we heard people talk about how "Clinton ran a surplus", but somehow it's never "the Republican controlled congress that took power in 1995 created a surplus". Even though the latter arguably had more influence on the generation of that surplus, everyone still gives it to Clinton...
I'm not saying this to make a Republican v Democrat statement. By the same token, Carter got bashed to death back in the 70s for the recession that occured during his presidency. Reagan got bashed for the unemployment rates caused by his "Reaganomics" plan in the 82/83 time period (then praised in the late 80s for the economic growth, then bashed in the early 90s because of the S&L crashes). Economic outcomes are maybe 1/3rd congress, 1/3rd executive (mostly decisions made by the Fed), and about 1/3rd random factors that pretty much no one can predict or take credit for.