I see that there is tons of outsourcing going on. I call up my computer company and my phone company for tech support and they are all Indians. The other day I get a call for some timesharing deal, the guy, who was obviously from India, says his name is Jim Smith. What a joke that was. I'll never forget that. He said he was from Georgia, but the area code on the caller ID was from the state of Washington. Since most people are on the do not call list, I assume that doesn't apply if the call comes from outside the US? So these US companies decided to just go to India and find workers to hawk their wares. Perhaps it was a big con just to justify firing all of their American sales people and hire overseas workers for cheaper labor. A big company can fire 100,000 US workers and say they save $40k/year in salary expense, they'll profit an extra $4 billion and pay around $1.4 billion in corporate income taxes, assuming a 35% corporate income tax rate, and the top executives will be happy and so will the IRS. Only the 100,000 fired workers will not be happy, but who cares about them and their families, we (top level executives) just want our stock to go up, so we can then unload it at the top to the poor workers that were fired, who are trying to desperately make money, so they invest in the stock market with the little money they have left and then lose everything. When most worker's jobs in this country have been outsourced, how will they have the money to buy goods and services from the companies that outsource? Don't these companies know that eventually the US consumer will be tapped out, their sales will suffer, and the stock has a good chance of suffering.
Yeah it's funny how these support reps from India have western names. But not all of them are in India. I knew an Indian guy who worked customer support and he was in the USA. Some callers would berate him, assuming he was in India when he actually was in Texas. As for outsourcing, I used to work at a company that outsourced development of one of its product to India. However the important products were still developed in the US. The bigger problem is the H-1 visa and importing of cheaper labor.
Too much doom and gloom. Many jobs are not outsourceable. For instance, nursing/healthcare, dentistry, construction, entertainment, retail, agriculture, banking etc. People said 25 years ago that manufacturing would cease to exist in the US by now because it was cheaper to build in Asia and Latin America, but plenty of things are still manufactured here. Billions of dollars worth of automobiles are still built here for instance. That's a far cry from what people said in the 80s would happen.
Form and GM are both laying off thousands of workers and closing plants all around the country. But you are right, there are plenty of healthcare jobs, until one day no one has health insurance because most will be unemployed and unable to afford health insurance, therefore doctors and hospitals close down shop. Many hospitals in this country have closed down due to unpaid medical bills, mostly from illegals and other poor folks, and soon middle class folks who become poor folks thanks to outsourcing. Then you mention that there are retail and agriculture jobs, both which pay crap.