Manufacturing jobs going over to China? Republicans fault. IT jobs going to India? Republicans. Acid rain? Republicans. Warm weather in November? Republicans.

In fact, all bad things, if you listen to some people, are the fault of Republicans. You see, they have a deep dark secret: They favor businesses. And as hard as this is believe, given how enlightened we're supposed to be these days, they actually think capitalism is good. Isn't that amazing? Capitalism good!

Let's take the charge that Republican policies are causing jobs to go overseas. What "policies" would that be? Would it be the granting of China permanent most favored trade status? Because that was Clinton? And now that the deed is done, what can the United States do?

Well, we could:

(a) Give corporations tax breaks and subsidies to help them "compete" despite having higher labor costs.  But Democrats would be quick to call that "Corporate Welfare". So we can't do that.

Or how about

( We smack some good old fashioned tarrifs on imports. Oh wait...can't do that, it violates the WTO agreement. As someone else (from Europe, land of massive subsidies for domestic companies and farmers) pointed out, the US is already in trouble for that. The steel tariff is not only against the WTO rules, it harms all kinds of other businesses.

Or how about..

(c) Break the union stranglehold. If you look at what manufacturing jobs have been lost, you'll find that it's most concentrated in jobs that had strong unions. Way to go union bosses! By making sure that assembly line workers gets $25+ per hour (when you factor in benefits) for putting in a bolt on a car, you've artificially inflated the temporary value of that labor.

The problem isn't that these were once "good paying jobs", it's that many of these jobs should never have been that good paying. They were artificially inflated largely thanks to union strikes. They raised salary expectations beyond what they should have been.

Calor's article talks about the IT industry. Once again, same story. The dot-com bubble gave a temporary and unrealistic expectation of what PHP coders, database administrators, web masters/designers, SQL developers should be making. $150,000 to write PHP that you learned over a course of 9 months in a class? That wasn't going to last. And it didn't. But salaries in those areas haven't returned to earth fast enough and so it's been easier for some companies to farm it out to India.

Not that companies are blameless mind you. The people making these farming out decisions tend to have an incomplete picture. In terms of IT, they don't make a distinction between the guy who can be brought up to speed in 6 months and the guru that's taken 10 years to get where he is in knowledge. To these managers (pity we can't farm those jobs out) all "technical" people are the same.

The same is somewhat true of manufacturing jobs. Some of the jobs going overseas are ones that really would be better off staying here in terms of good business. But such decisions tend to be very brute-force in nature. All or nothing.

But I don't see, either way, how the Republicans can be blamed for this.  As bitter a pill it is to swallow, if someone can do your $20 per hour job for a nickel an hour, you might be...just maybe...being over compensated a bit.  American workers don't need to bring their salaries down to a nickel an hour to be competitive. The infrastructure of the United States is worth a lot per hour. American productivity is the highest in the world by a long shot.  But it's generally not high enough, even factoring in infrastructure, to make up a 100X cost difference.

There are no realistic government policies that will enable American workers to be more competitive. There are certainly policies the US should target on China (I think giving China most favored trade status and helping them get into the WTO -- sins of Clinton and Bush was a mistake). But in general, the only ones who can make American workers more competitive are American workers.  Just something they should think about the next time a textile union is thinking of going on strike because they want free optical insurance.