Fiorina and Barrett told Congress that US tech jobs have to go offshore
on account of the crappy educational system in this country:
Warning that the U.S. lead in high technology is in serious jeopardy from competition from other nations, they outlined a long-term agenda to improve grade-school and high-school education, double federal spending on basic research in the physical sciences and form a national policy to promote high- speed broadband communications networks, as Japan and Korea have done.
Sen. Boxer has offered to fix the schools, but it was people like her that broke them to begin with, with their insistence on soft subjects like self-esteem and emoting sessions instead of actual science and math education, and their insistence on affirmative action for middle-class white women to the detriment of actual academic standards. But education isn’t really the issue that motivates off-shoring, costs are. I’ve never heard a tech industry manager say he wanted to move software development to India in order to increase quality, it’s always to lower costs, and labor costs are driven by cost-of-living. The major components of COL are housing and taxes, so the more government involvement we see in education and technology, the worse we can expect that equation to get.
So, the problem with the American worker isn’t lack of training, it’s the cost of living in places like California and New York, and no amount of federal pork is going to fix that problem. The alternative to moving low-value jobs such as customer service to India and China is to move them to lower cost-of-living areas within North America, such as the drizzly Northwest and the Sunny South. Boxer and her ilk lose if that happens too, alas.
(edited Saturday noon)