A question for liberals about outsourcing:
Why is outsourcing a bad thing . . . except when it comes to outsourcing timber industry jobs in the Pacific northwest?
We now import almost a third of the nations timber, because weve put so much American timberland off limits for logging. (Forestland in the U.S., by the way, grew by 10 million acres in the 1990s.) So, when are liberals and environmentalists going to start complaining about Americas dependence on foreign timber?
My unscientific sampling of the outsourcing question finds a very high correlation between outsourcing and insourcing. E.g., for most types of jobs outsourced, there are fairly similar numbers insourced (US workers hired by foreign companies operating in the US).
Further, the outsourced employees (those whose job went offshore) are predominantly members of labor unions while the insourced employees are predominantly non-union and live in "right to work states."
Look at the auto industry right now. Many US nameplate cars are built in Mexico and Canada while many foreign nameplate cars are built in the US. As a result, my Honda (built in Ohio)is more "American" than my cousins Ford (built in Mexico). Yet, if I worked at an American-owned auto assembly plant, Id have to park my Honda in the back of the parking lot in the area where "foreign" cars have to park.
Enlightened, arent they?