The rich world's disappearing jobs

Asia Times Online ^ | Oct 8, 2003 | John Berthelsen and Indrajit Basu

[Willie Green]

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.

If the North American Free Trade Act passes, "you will hear a giant sucking sound of jobs going south of the border".
 - H Ross Perot, 1992

In the developed world and particularly in the United States, the scope of jobs disappearing overseas is widening beyond all imagining, to professions that almost nobody expected to be hit, and with far higher incomes than anybody thought possible as globalization bonds with the law of unintended consequences.

The catalyst is the Internet. As instant communication becomes more ubiquitous, the developed world's white-collar professions, from CAD/CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing) to accounting to medicine to architecture to aircraft design to research and development to engineering to equity research and financial management to knowledge management to revenue-cycle management - a whole panorama of high-income employment - are inexorably going.

The impact on American and European society is inevitably going to be far more profound than almost anyone understands today. It is already responsible for major positive changes in the living standards of the middle class in other parts of the world.

The United States currently accounts for as much as 70 percent of the world's "outsourcing", as it is called, or sometimes offshoring. McKinsey & Co, the international consulting firm, projects that the flight of jobs offshore to developing countries will grow by 30-40 percent a year over the next five years. By the highest estimates, as many as a million jobs have disappeared overseas from the US job market since the current economic slowdown began in 2000 and could represent a major reason for the struggle the US economy is undergoing to right itself.

McKinsey puts the number lost from the United States at a much lower 400,000 today, but expects it to grow to as many as 3.3 million by 2015. The business-consulting firm A T Kearney Inc projects that half a million jobs, or 8 percent of total employment by banks, brokerage houses and insurance companies, will go overseas within five years.

But to show how extensive the phenomenon can be, consider some of the more unlikely developments over the last three months:

• India is emerging as the health-care destination of choice for an increasing number of surgery candidates, with more than 60,000 foreign patients from 34 countries treated in its top-flight Apollo Hospitals chain in the past decade. A delegation of Indian doctors was recently invited to London to brief British Prime Minister Tony Blair's medical advisers on flying surgery patients from the United Kingdom to Mumbai and or New Delhi for operative and post-operative care, allowing them to recuperate, and flying them back to the UK far cheaper than treating them at home. Routine cardiac surgery at the best hospitals in India costs about US$35,000, with a success rate of 98.5 percent, compared with about $150,000 in the United States. For more complicated problems that cost far more than that, cost differentials are anywhere from 200 percent to 500 percent to off the chart. And India is not alone; breast implants in Thailand from top-flight cosmetic surgeons cost as little as 50,000 baht ($1,260) compared with a median price of about $5,000 in the United States.

• Fifteen global car makers, including General Motors, Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Audi, Isuzu and Nissan, have set up design offices in India with a combined budget of $1.5 billion to outsource auto design. Industry estimates are that the cost of auto design in Europe's exclusive Pininfarina and Bertone design houses run as high as $800 an hour, while low-cost designers in Bangalore can do lower-level design for $60 an hour.

• India's government is in the process of liberalizing its accounting rules under continuing World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations on services. In a move being closely watched by the Big Four accounting firms - PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Ernst and Young, KMPG, and Deloitte Touche and Tomatsu - accounting, bookkeeping and auditing services are to be opened to overseas competition by the end of next year. Indian firms are to be given reciprocal market access abroad. Indian accounting costs are a fraction of those in the United States.

• Fashion design is a fast-growing field in Vietnam and India; 350 domestic and international buyers came to Mumbai to look at India's fledgling clothing fashion designs in a glitz-filled week in July. Designer Rophit Bal is working with putative tennis star Anna Kournikova. Ritu Beri is showing in Paris. Tarin Tahiliani has been featured in New York's Fashion Week and is booked for a show in Milan, the heart of Europe's fashion industry.

• The US Department of Education estimates that the United States will need an additional 2.2 million teachers over the next decade. The Executive Recruiters Association, the representative body of recruitment agencies in India, is urging the Indian government to appeal to the WTO seeking an end to what they consider to be restrictive trade practices in the teaching professions and allow more Indian teachers into the US. Indian teachers, with excellent English-language skills, would find an annual salary of $35,000 an enormous amount of money. There are already some school districts from Texas said to be recruiting in India.

This article concentrates mainly on India and is only a small specific sample of the developed-world jobs and services that are in the process of disappearing overseas. Canada, Ireland and Israel, with large English-speaking populations, are also particularly attractive to Western firms, primarily because English is widely spoken, and well. But in other countries such as India, the Philippines, South Africa, Ghana and Sri Lanka, English is also widely spoken, and well, and costs are minuscule. Russia, with its well-educated tech professions, is also a destination.

"Anywhere you have social and economic growth, any of the Third World countries are wonderful opportunities to set up services platforms. You can pretty much follow where the British Empire went," Marc Liebman, president of Everest Group, an outsource consulting firm in Dallas, told Asia Times Online. "They left strong business and physical infrastructure behind them."

In a stunningly prophetic article, Frances Cairncross, a senior editor at The Economist, wrote in 1993 that the communications revolution had wrought what she called "the death of distance". In that article, she posited that there had been three profound transport revolutions since the 19th century, the first when the arrival of steam initiated a steep fall in the cost of moving goods. The second came in the 20th century, when the cost of transporting people fell to the point where vast migrations across borders brought tens of millions of immigrants from old Europe to the Americas, and since has resulted in massive movements of economic refugees from the poor countries to the rich ones.

The third revolution, Cairncross wrote, would dominate the first half of the current century. It is the diminishing cost of transporting information. Her vision has come true even faster than she thought. Because of fiber-optic cable, satellites and digital compression, the transport of information can be basically free. The enormous charges for personal calls on telephone lines across the Atlantic or the Pacific are virtually all gravy. Once the satellite or the cable is in place and the capital expenses are paid, there is no expense. Companies with their own transponders on satellites have lowered their costs dramatically.

Thus it is possible, for instance, for Fidelity Investments to put its call centers in Ireland. It is increasingly probable that a call to any repair service or help line will be routed not to the Midwestern United States but overseas to the Philippines, Ireland, India or any one of a half-dozen other locations. Indian schools are training prospective employees to speak in American accents. Back-office processing such as accounts receivable and payable, claims processing, revenue collection and passenger management are not going to be done in the United States anymore.

JP Morgan Chase, the investment-banking firm, said it plans to move some of the work of preparing stock-market research reports to India. The Financial Times of London has more than 100 such analysts in Manila, entering data from company reports all over Asia into computers, so the information can be sold as databases for investment banks at a fraction of the cost the banks would have to pay their own people.

"What we went through 10-15 years ago with manufacturing and blue-collar jobs, we are now about to go through with white-collar jobs," said Michel Jenssen, president of supplier solutions for the Dallas-based Everest offshore consulting group. "It still takes three to six months to ship manufacturing components offshore, less if you can send by air. But with services, with telecommunications technology, movement is now measured in milliseconds. You can move the work around, you can scan images, you can move workflow to India with no more difficulty than you move it from the San Francisco Bay Area to Texas."

It is possible, as Vivek Agrawal, who led a McKinsey team studying the issue of offshoring and wrote a report titled "Offshoring: Is It a Win-Win Game?" said in an interview recently with Asia Times Online, that the departure of these jobs is healthy for American society. It frees up capital and labor for more rewarding, or productive, or effective jobs, Agrawal says. A JP Morgan Chase spokesman told reporters recently that moving market research preparation to India would get rid of number-crunching, freeing its US staff to focus on higher-level financial analysis and spending more time with customers. But it is hard to figure out what jobs are more rewarding or productive or high-end, for instance, than thoracic surgery or architectural design, or what jobs can replace them in the developed world.

Agrawal describes most of the information-technology (IT) jobs headed offshore as relatively low-skilled. If Indians or Pakistanis or other nationalities can do the really high-skilled jobs, he says, it is much more likely that they would obtain visas to move to the United States and do the jobs here - although the US government, on October 1, cut the quota for so-called H1-B visas for skilled workers from 195,000 to 65,000. The effect of that cut is most likely to be that US employers, unable to find people to do the jobs here, will take the jobs to where the workers are - and pay them lots less, thus losing the multiplier effect of their paychecks in the United States (see H1-B visas: US gets it wrong again ).

The loss of these jobs overseas is also probably going to affect developed-world inflation. The investment bank ABN-AMRO, in an October 3 analysis of the US economy, wrote that while a cyclical rebound in economic activity is forecast for late 2003, "this rebound will not produce the typical firming in underlying inflation that influenced monetary-policy decisions and the interest-rate outlook in previous recoveries".

That is at least partly because, while US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has been given credit for keeping inflation in check in the United States over the past decade, it is equally likely that it has been due to outsourcing and offshoring. Inflation classically starts to pick up as households increase consumption spending and firms increase investment spending. That tightens the labor market, which in turn means that labor can pick and choose between jobs, and for many jobs there aren't enough workers. Workers had the luxury of going on strike to demand higher pay.

But since manufacturing jobs first began to go offshore with the assembly of consumer products in the 1950s, workers from auto plants to steel mills to the panoply of America's rust-belt industries discovered that going on strike to demand higher pay meant their jobs could disappear, first to Japan, then to South Korea and Taiwan, then to the Southeast Asian countries, and then all over the world.

Now, ominously, that is beginning to happen to the middle class as Cairncross's thesis on the death of distance starts to prove out. What happens if, for instance, US health-insurance providers cotton to the fact that an unwilling Joe Bloggs could be flown to Honduras, say, to have his gall-bladder surgery, and that his airplane fare (charter, of course, to take a planeload of surgery patients at a time) and lodging could cost half or a tenth what it costs at Sinai Mercy Omni-Surgery in Middletown, USA? The insurance company, like the British National Healthcare Service, would contemplate that the out-of-control cost of medical care in the United States is going to stabilize, no matter how much Mr Bloggs would prefer to have his gall bladder incised at home - especially if their pharmaceutical costs descend as well.

And they well could. In August, the multinational pharmaceutical companies struck a deal with the WTO to create a loophole that allows the neediest countries to override patents on expensive drugs and order cheaper copies from generic manufacturers in exchange for a small payment. A combination of AIDS drugs that in the United States costs $14,000 per patient per year can be delivered for a small fraction of that amount.

Indian pharmaceutical companies, for instance, are producing generics for many pharmaceuticals at pennies on the dollar compared with the cost in the United States. Even today, hordes of US consumers go to the Mexican and Canadian borders to buy their prescription drugs.

Americans, and later Europeans, watched with equanimity starting in the 1950s when manufacturing jobs started to disappear into low-cost factories in Asia. Only the workers who had filled these emptying factories and the labor unions who represented them railed against the loss of jobs. Nonetheless, while in 1950 about 35 percent of America's labor force were engaged in manufacturing, that figure has fallen to about 12.5 percent today.

McKinsey analyst Agrawal and the team that wrote the study argue that offshoring is not particularly bad for the United States because at least 70 percent of US jobs are in services that are produced and consumed locally.

"We would argue that not only is the US fully capable of withstanding these changes, as it will be able to create jobs faster than offshoring eliminates them, but that the current debate misses the point entirely." The point is, McKinsey says, that offshoring creates wealth for US companies and consumers and therefore for the US as a whole and is "just one more example of the innovation that keeps US companies at the leading edge of competitiveness across multiple sectors".

Indeed. It's great for companies. McKinsey estimates that management jobs moving offshore will rise from zero in 2000 to 288,281 by 2015. Business jobs will rise from 10,787 to 328,281. Computer jobs going offshore will rise from 27,171 in 2000 to 472,632 in 2015. Office jobs - the back-shop data-entry jobs that consist of keying in data - already projected at nearly 590,000 by 2005, will skyrocket to 1.66 million by 2015.

Ironically, many of the disappearing jobs owe their departure to H Ross Perot, the failed US presidential candidate whose "giant sucking sound" quote started this article and which continues to reverberate across the United States today.

The five biggest outsourcing consulting companies in the US today are in Dallas, Texas. Asked why, Marc Liebman of Everest said, "Because Ross Perot was here." Perot, first with his company EDS and later with Perot Systems Corp, pioneered data transfer and became a worldwide provider of outsourced IT services.

According to BusinessWorld, an Indian publication, Perot Systems in 1999 entered a 50 percent joint venture with HCL Technologies of India to create HCL Perot Systems to handle billing and claims for health care companies in the United States. It is a pioneer in outsourcing data overseas to cheaper labor for major corporations.

[lelio]

There was a pretty good article in yesterday's Investors Business Daily on this subject. It somewhat turns Ricardo's Comparative advantage on its head: now people all over the world can do backoffice jobs in any city. There's no advantage to being in a particular location for a lot of jobs out there.

Perhaps the comparative advantage of China and India is that they have 1B people that will work for cheap. Is that helpful for the US economy in the long run?

[Support Free Republic]

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Please donate. Thanks for your consideration.

[Malsua]

While I agree that much of this will occur.

I only know how my current position is.

We are exporting our "sample" program. That is, the things my company gives away for free(which runs up to 10-40 millions of dollars a year). The upside is that for each sample, we generate an order. For example, we give away 20000 pieces of something personalized, in general, we will generate 20000 pieces worth of orders. This is not to say that all of those pieces generate orders, far from it. The difference is the quantity of pieces per order just about equals the difference.

Outsourcing our "expensive" sample program means that we can do more samples and in return do more orders. We only make money on orders. We will actually hire people to fufill the orders, because the numbers are greater. "orders" will continue to be manufactured in the USA because people won't accept a 6 week delay on everything made.

However, all that said, our business is somewhat unique.
Other companies that just farm out expensive labor parts will see big profits by outsourcing to China. The trend will continue and companies that can deal with 6 week lead times will prosper. The Great Wall Mart is a prime example.

MFG jobs are going to continue to go away. Best not to be part of that if you want to remain employed.

-Mal

[sarcasm]

ping

[Prodigal Son]

the scope of jobs disappearing overseas is widening beyond all imagining, to professions that almost nobody expected to be hit,

Well, they were just idiots then weren't they?

[eno_]

Is that helpful for the US economy in the long run?

Depends on what you mean by "the long run."

It means India and China will achieve first-world living standards in record time. This means 2 billion more people will be consuming middle-class products, and that is VERY VERY good for the global economy.

In the short run, however, being a skilled white collar information worker in a first world country will only lucrative to the truly elite.

[Poohbah]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/997799/posts

"Gunman's Mom Wants Worker Compensation (Son killed co-workers; self at work)"

Of course, having to deal with totally whack (bleep) like that has ZERO impact on convincing companies to outsource.

[surely_you_jest]

Bookmark to read later.

[volchef]

While I appreciate your comments, as someone who is familiar with mainland china's and India's cultures I can speak with experience when I tell you there is NO WAY the average Chinese or Indian person is going to achive a first class standard of living in the near future. These countries have some of the poorest people in the world and India's caste system and China's government are going to hamper these countries from ever pulling themselves out of the poverty ridden cess pools they are now.

[proxy_user]

On the other hand, the programmers in India making 12 to 15 lakh a year are living like kings. The Indian guys at my place say if the salaries in India keep improving, they'll sell their houses in New Jersey and go back.

[RightWhale]

Is that helpful for the US economy in the long run?

The big part of America's wealth creation was manufacturing and industry, and that is moving overseas. The idea is to create wealth some other way. That is, get rich without working. What a great country! How does one do that, BTW?

[ChromeDome]

bump to read later

[stuartcr]

I guess the only jobs left will be with the govt. or BurgerKing....

[RinaseaofDs]

The number of orwellian inconsistancies in this article is staggering.

I wouldn't mind any of this outsourcing if it were to countries that we have truly RECIPROCAL trade relationships with. China and India explicitly exclude the US in entire areas of their economy. China just told MS there is essentially no market there two months ago.

This crap is going to continue until finally we start outsourcing litigation.

What this does article does NOT cover is the cost of managing outsourcing in the short and medium term will likely exceed the cost of keeping the work in house.

Another thing that was glossed over in this article is the deflationary effect this is going to have on both the US and Europe.

It also didn't cover the huge shift in what government can mandate from a company doing business in the US or Europe. Those costs are now dictated by the lowest common denominator country with which any industry competes. You can want fire extinguishers every 100 feet in a US factory, but not if it isn't also mandated by factories in China and India, because those costs MUST be accounted for in ways that can't be today.

The effect this is going to have on the developed world's economies if left unchecked in the next three years is going to be dramatic.

The real laugher in this article was the gloss-over done on the pharma industry. How long do you think poor countries, which I can only assume include China and India, will be able to take advantage of subsidized drugs and patent go-arounds when the market that makes that possible is in the grip of truly out of control medical costs? Right now Rx drugs account for 22% of the increases in medical insurance premiums. Part of that is accounted for in subsidies made to Europe (countries act as central buyers, like in Canada), and to poor countries (who get massive price breaks)

Perot is looking like a genius at this point.

[Truth666]

For people looking for alternatives to the "global village" :
Archbishop calls for return to small farms

[Carry_Okie]

All of this is possible because of a Pax Americana paid for exclusively by the American taxpayer. Who benefits from that subsidy? Why aren't they paying for it? Who gets to risk their life in harm's way?

That's the real sellout.

[RightWhale]

only jobs left will be with the govt. or BurgerK

That seems to be the plan, and it's right on schedule.

[snopercod]

I just bought a York heat-pump system for my home. The fan-coil unit was made in Mexico. The compressor unit was made in the USA. The registers in the various rooms were all make in Mexico.

[snopercod]

[How does one]...get rich without working?

Trivial question. Politics.

[snopercod]

I was earning $40 per hour in the 80's, $30 per hour in the 90's, and $15 per hour now.

Is that deflation?

[Reeses]

This crap is going to continue until finally we start outsourcing litigation ... Right now Rx drugs account for 22% of the increases in medical insurance premiums.

Litigation? We have too much of that, which is the real reason health costs increase faster than inflation, and a big reason why businesses are moving jobs overseas. Drug companies raise their prices to pay for multi-billion dollar legal lotto payouts. They are not making a killing, else their stock prices would be rising fast.

Not mentioned in this article is the impact of outsourcing on government finances. Because of progressive tax rates, when these high tech workers find new jobs making 1/3rd less, the government will see 2/3rds less in tax revenue. Also there will be more demand for social services, with about 50% of the money spent lost in government overhead.

We need laws to discourage outsourcing, and/or reward American job creation. We don't need lawyers killing the golden goose.

[Odyssey-x]

A friend of mine went to a high school reunion and the most popular job was lawyer. I think I know why now, that's the only thing for smart people to do with any job security.

[sarcasm]

[eno_]

You are correct that both India and China have stupendous numbers of poor people. But they also have enough middle-class people that, as markets, they have more demand and more ability to pay for middle-class goods than many other nations.

And by "record time" I mean that in 50 years these nations may be no more backward than, say, Eastern Europe is today. Before these places started do highly skilled work, the answer to "When will India be like Europe or the U.S." would have been "Somewhere between 300 years and never."

[AZLiberty]

There is a solution to this problem, but it's not pretty. A ten-fold devaluation of the US dollar would even us up with the rest of the world. Where's George Soros putting his money right now?

[eno_]

There are a lot of underemployed lawyers out there. I had a top Boston litigator writing very mundane nastygrams for me this year for no more than than his flunky would have cost me two years ago.

[Truth666]

That's no solution - because the problem isn't the jobs. It's the disappearing salaries.

[traumer]

The downward spiral continues... and accelerates.

Does anyone in the position of power and decision-making
give a crap ??

[rdb3]

This drumbeat is going on day after day after day after day after day.

It is so old.

[elbucko]

Is that deflation?

It's Bill Clinton.

[A. Pole]

The impact on American and European society is inevitably going to be far more profound than almost anyone understands today. It is already responsible for major positive changes in the living standards of the middle class in other parts of the world. The United States currently accounts for as much as 70 percent of the world's "outsourcing", as it is called, or sometimes offshoring.

Very interesting!

[A. Pole]

And by "record time" I mean that in 50 years these nations may be no more backward than, say, Eastern Europe is today. Before these places started do highly skilled work, the answer to "When will India be like Europe or the U.S." would have been "Somewhere between 300 years and never."

Maybe 100 years or less. We need to be patient.

[Leisler]

Just bought a Stihl chainsaw. Made in Virginia.

[Leisler]

Lawyers. Smart.

Never. Cunning, yes. Smart? No.

[Age of Reason]

2 billion more people will be consuming middle-class products, and that is VERY VERY good for the global economy.

Bad for freedom.

I suspect competition for resources like oil will fiercely increase, starting new wars--wars no longer fought with bows and arrows--but with modern weapons in the hands of nations immature in the possession and management of high technolgy.

And in peace, when everyone in the world consumes energy like the United States, expect energy to be rationed.

And expect draconian anti-pollution laws, etc.

How I wish they had left those less developed countries to their own devices! But business just couldn't help making a buck by selling them technology.

Now everyone is starting to worry that some of the technology we gave to the Third World may come back to us like the Third Avenue EL scrap sold to Japan came back in WWII!

That said--here's something else:

What will happen to the price of real estate in the USA, when you're lucky just to have a job at Wal-Mart?

Will real esate surprise everyone by becoming a lousy long-range investment for the first time in U.S. history?

[GOP_1900AD]

Network Marketing? .... "THE FIVE PERCENT SOLUTION.....!"

[this_ol_patriot]

The idea is to create wealth some other way. That is, get rich without working. What a great country! How does one do that, BTW?

Become a baker or join a circus. There will be an explosion of jobs providing bread and circuses to the unwashed masses. Better still become a politician, that will take care of the circus part.

[Malsua]

Stihl is a GREAT company.

It competes worldwide and WINS!

I can hope this remains the case. In the mid 90s, I worked for a logger and most of our loggers used Stihl chainsaws. They are as good as you can get.

Been out of the logging business for a number of years now. I can't comment further on it Stihl other than I know that the company is still doing well domestically.

-Mal

[JoeSchem]

When I read about how surgery is far cheaper in India at comparable quality to the US, I began to wonder if maybe globalization isn't such a bad thing. It certainly runs an end pass around our overregulated health care industry!

[Malsua]

I may have been a bit unspecific in my prior messages.

My logging teams cut 10,000 board foot a day per man. Using Stihl chainsaws. We only cut trees 18 inches or bigger. We never clear cut anything and we never left any site abused. I made damn sure about that. I'm not a greenie but I'm a greenie's best friend. While huge trees were harvested, big trees are left. The biggest trees get painted.

[LibertarianInExile]

Let your family try to sue in India if the doctor kills you via a negligent act, and that might change your mind. I'm no trial lawyer, and I hate the current cartel running American medicine, but I do think there are some benefits to the current malpractice situation. Doctors in this country are f'in CAREFUL. They know that if they mess up someone's life, their lives and livelihoods are just as on the line.

On the other hand, doctors in Mexico and India and Korea and other off-shore 'medical paradises' are only as careful as they feel like being, because who's gonna get `em if they aren't? The only doctors around are generally related to the folks running the gummint in those 'developed' countries!

[ninenot]

This means 2 billion more people will be consuming middle-class products, and that is VERY VERY good for the global economy.

Nope.

It's good for GM, but not if you happen to work for GM in the USA.

For USA workers, it's curtains.

[ninenot]

I just bought a York heat-pump system for my home. The fan-coil unit was made in Mexico. The compressor unit was made in the USA. The registers in the various rooms were all make in Mexico.

In two years, all the replacement parts you order will be shipped from Red China.

[ninenot]

Is that deflation?

You ain't seen nuttin yet.

Even if you manage to remain at $15./hr, or up to $20/hr--housing values are going to slide like an avalanche in the next 2-5 years.

All those CPA's will be out of work, like a number of labor-relations lawyers are now.

So not only can YOU not afford the house you could two years ago--THEY won't either.

Then what happens??

[Joe Hadenuf]

The Great Wall Mart

I'm beginning not to like that GD store.....

[ninenot]

Not really. Lawyers who service manufacturers are beginning to get hit really hard. because manufacturers are going away, as well as their workers (thus, labor attorneys are going to get hit, too.)

And if taxes can be done in India, tax lawyer-ing will be done there, too. Briefs are electronic---

Finally, as corporate profits diminish, even the PI's will get hit, because if there's no money, there are no settlements.

[ninenot]

Off-topic: Old man Stihl INVENTED the chain saw. Learned that on HistoryChannel the other night.

In five years, HistoryChannel will be telling us that the USA >B?WAS</b> the manufacturing capital of the world.

[Cobra64]

A friend of mine went to a high school reunion and the most popular job was lawyer.

I was a business analyst / distribution consultant for 15 years at JD Edwards. I saw one of our invoices and it turned out that we did not charge tax for our services. I talked to some very astute friends of mine in the legal industry, their response was, "Who do you think works up this legislation? We do. Lawyers are not going to charge their clients tax. We just raise our rates 7% and put it in our pockets."

[waterstraat]

The impact on American and European society is inevitably going to be far more profound than almost anyone understands today. It is already responsible for major positive changes in the living standards of the middle class in other parts of the world. The United States currently accounts for as much as 70 percent of the world's "outsourcing", as it is called, or sometimes offshoring.

It will be more profound than anywhere else, since american labor is higher priced than any other labor, therefore, more americans will be without jobs than in any other country once the full impact of free trade takes effect, and the world labor price is what is paid for all labor needed by american corporations, meaning very very few americans will have any jobs, other than servicing and tourist/restaurant/store clerks/hotel/etc jobs which have to geographically be here. All other jobs will go to the country that can provide the cheapest labor which will not be any american.