What concerns me most is not simply the loss of jobs in off-shoring, but the technology transfer that takes place where the manufacturing takes place. The learning curve is constant for everyone concerned, and if its happening there, it isn’t happening here.
Americans are famously “can-do” people, famously practical, pragmatic, and inventive, but that’s because Americans were doing things, building things, fixing things, inventing things. When they are no longer doing things, the very thing that made them what they were will no longer be true of them. If you no longer know how to do anything, you aren’t going to be inventing the next generation of technology or anything else. If you don’t know how things work, you will fall into passivity and superstition. Which is where we are headed right now.
Basically, when you off shore operations (jobs), you lose the knowledge and technical base over time. It’s really bad for the country while we’re told it’s inevitable.