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American Dream No Longer Alive And Well Brian Farmer For as long as any of us can remember, it has been an article of faith that each generation of Americans would do better than the last, because that has been our experience. And, other than for relatively short periods of time, such as the Great Depression of the 1930s, that is what history has shown us. A new report by a group of prominent think tanks indicates that this upward mobility is no longer happening. In trying to explain this phenomenon, one analyst commented, "...it's possible that men are not working as hard as they used to." This seems implausible, given both the continued growth in productivity (more is being produced in less time, indicating that people are working harder) and the continual barrage of media reports about overworked and overstressed workers. What seems even harder to fathom is that there is absolutely no mention, either in the Wall Street Journal article, or in the text of the report itself, about the effects of outsourcing American jobs to foreign countries. Since the early 1990s, China has been the primary beneficiary of relocating manufacturing activity offshore. With a billion people living in poverty, China offers a gigantic pool of cheap labor that American multinational corporations have been eager to exploit, in order to take advantage of the opportunity to minimize their labor costs. With the passage of time, technological advances have made worldwide data communications available at a very low cost. As a result, a growing list of services can now be outsourced, as well.
We're all familiar with call centers in India, but electronic service delivery has also extended to accounting, computer programming, engineering services, and a whole lot more. Economist Alan Blinder wrote in The Washington Post that "the offshoring of service jobs from rich countries such as the United States to poor countries such as India may pose major problems for tens of millions of American workers over the coming decades." Proponents of globalization argue that outsourcing millions of electronically deliverable service jobs will reduce costs and boost productivity in the United States. But the virtues of globalization don't look so benign from the viewpoint of an American computer programmer or accountant. They've done what they were told to do: They went to college and prepared for well-paid careers with bountiful employment opportunities. But now their bosses are eyeing legions of well-qualified, English-speaking programmers and accountants in India, for example, who will happily work for a fraction of what Americans earn. When good-paying manufacturing and service jobs move offshore, displaced American workers are often forced to take lower-paying jobs that offer inferior benefits and little, if any, upward mobility. But even the availability of these jobs is coming under pressure. Ironically, at the very time millions of jobs are being outsourced, millions of illegal immigrants are flooding into the U.S., to escape poverty and unemployment in their own countries and look for jobs here. And this is in addition to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants that Congress allows to enter our country legally every year. The article does highlight something rather disconcerting: The report also found that between 1947 and 1974, productivity, or output per hour, and median family income, adjusted for inflation, both roughly doubled. Between 1974 and 2000, productivity rose 56% while income rose 29%. Between 2000 and 2005, productivity rose 16% while median income fell 2%. In other words, with the passage of time, workers are not sharing proportionately in the gains in national income. More of this income is being retained as corporate profits, disproportionately benefiting the owners of capital. The present reality is that the rich truly are getting richer, while the rest of us are getting poorer. Getting back to limited government under the Constitution, fiscal responsibility, and a sound foreign policy is the only way to reverse the trend. ---------------------------------------------------
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