Outsourcing, Insourcing, Two tier economies

The Causes of Unemployment
By Phyllis Schlafly Friday, January 8, 2010

Much has been written about our current high unemployment, but there is a strange reluctance by both liberal and conservative commentators to assess blame for the dramatic loss of well-paying American jobs. The causes are not only the general recession and the collapse of the housing market, but bad decisions by government and business that deserve finger-pointing.

Since 2000, the U.S. has lost millions of jobs due to outsourcing and insourcing. Those are euphemisms for exporting high-paying jobs to low-wage foreign countries, while importing an uneducated underclass willing to work for lower-than-U.S. wages without benefits.

The winners in this game include the corporate executives and stockholders who benefited by cheap labor, but the losers are the U.S. middle class. In addition to unemployment for those whose jobs were eliminated, the real wages (adjusted for inflation) for the jobs remaining have steadily declined.

Since 2000, the U.S. manufacturing sector has lost nearly 25 percent of our total manufacturing workforce. Many of those jobs have gone to Communist China, where toys for the U.S. market are made in sweatshops by workers paid as little as 36 cents per hour, and many white-collar jobs have gone to India where telephone operators can be hired for $1 an hour.

Leading economists are becoming willing to admit that their devotion to free trade was misplaced. Paul Samuelson, Nobel prize-winning economist and a dominating figure in U.S. economics for decades, faced reality before he died and admitted, “There is nothing in the theory that says trade is always a win-win for every group.â€