Why oh why doesn't J. criticize Kerry?

J. writes,

...in the post-World War II world, it seems clear that the U.S. has gained much more than it has lost from the economic development of its trading partners. The U.S. as a whole benefits enormously from the fact that Japan is a rich industrial economy rather than something like Indonesia. The producer and consumer surplus the U.S. gains from trade with rich western Europe far exceeds what it gains from trade with poor eastern Europe. The way to bet seems to be that examples like the growth of other producers to compete with the cotton south are the exception, and win-win benefits are the rule.

If this is not to be the case in the future, there needs to be an argument made as to why the normal post-World War II pattern will be broken. And I haven't heard anybody make such an argument yet.

Moreover, it is important to distinguish between situations in which foreign countries do not acquire the capabilities to produce goods traditionally made in the U.S., and situations in which the U.S. imposes tariffs and quotas to protect domestic industries. The first may leave America better off: we sell them good stuff at expensive near-monopoly prices. The second does not: we can't make them buy our (now overpriced) exports, and trade barriers simply cut off the benefits from mutual specialization in areas of comparative advantage that David Ricardo identified long ago.

This leaves the question of what is the appropriate public policy response to successful high-tech "outsourcing": Imposing tariffs and quotas to protect domestic demand is surely a bad idea, for standard Ricardian reasons. Attempting to slow the rate at which modern technologies are transferred to other countries is surely a bad idea too: there is no surer way to store up huge amounts of economic and political trouble for the future than for the United States to embark on a policy of trying to slow economic growth in India, China, and elsewhere.

I think that the correct policy response is the one outlined by Robert Reich in his Work of Nations of a decade and a half ago: First, get our people out of industry segments where we are about to lose comparative advantage and where wages are about to take a big dive--this is the reason we Democrats like various forms of Trade Adjustment Assistance, for those who work in such industries are about to get shafted and have done nothing to deserve it (and have the ability to impose enormous costs on the rest of us through trade barriers if the political dice roll their way). Second, make sure the public investments in basic research are there to spark applied research and development to create new industries and new forms of high-tech in which our labor and our capital can be very productive (NIH, NSF, DARPA anyone?). Third, remember that the principal determinants of our prosperity and our productivity come from within: get public investment in infrastructure right, private savings and investment high, and investment in education high as well.

Remember: few would be worried about "outsourcing" if the U.S. unemployment rate were still close to four percent, rather than at the above six percent level that it is. To the extent that a structural cure is being proposed for what is really a macroeconomic problem, do not expect it to end well. And remember: a network-design job artificially kept in Sacramento when it could be done more cheaply in Singapore produces extra income for a network engineer in Sacramento, but has costs as well: in a diminished capital inflow that reduces construction and the earnings of construction workers, in higher costs for businesses installing their networks that shows up in lower salaries they pay their workers, in lower earnings and stock prices for HP. Given the all-thumbs hand the U.S. government has to try to guide industrial development through tools other than maintaining the infrastructure of a market society and the provision of basic research and other public goods, it is hard to imagine that the costs to the country as a whole will not greatly outweigh the benefits.

I'm skeptical about the help the gov't can provide to those who lose their jobs, but certainly Kerry could use this argument instead of whipping up anti-trade sentiment. Or maybe he can't win without it. Sigh.

This sounds convincing, but...

Asian values lead suicidal parents to kill kids

"In 2001, 2,500 Taiwanese committed suicide. Of those, there were 18 parent-child suicides, accounting for 0.72 per cent of the total number of suicides," it said.

"This is three times higher than the number of parent-[child] suicides in the US," the report said.

Most of the Taiwanese parents were middle-aged when they killed their children and committed suicide, the report said. They ended their lives for reasons of unemployment, debt, marital troubles or mental problems.

The children they killed were mainly infants.

Taiwan mothers are twice as likely as fathers to kill their children when they commit suicide.

The high number of parent-child suicides results from Asian traditions, in which adults are seen as having the right to decide their children's life and death.

When the parents want to commit suicide, they take along their children under the excuse that if they left their children behind, no one would care for them, the report said.

Less than one percent is a pretty small figure to hang your hat on, though.

Where the sun don't shine

Seoul Tries Hard to Keep Its 'Sunshine Policy' Free of Clouds
By JAMES BROOKE

Being able to promote an image of peace and harmony on the peninsula helps South Korea keep its bond ratings low and offers a justification for reduced military spending. So South Korea goes to great length to avoid offending North Korea.

After North Korea's military grumbled this summer that when its soldiers looked across the demilitarized zone at night they saw neon-illuminated crosses atop churches, South Korea unplugged the crosses...

Few South Korean overtures are reciprocated. For example, under bills now in the National Assembly, South Koreans would be allowed to freely access North Korean Web sites and to travel to North Korea. South Korea's official defense papers would no longer describe North Korea as "the main enemy." Other bills would end national security laws banning advocacy of North Korea's Communist system.

None of these moves has been met with a wisp of a concession from North Korea. Instead, North Korea recently restricted cellphone use and travel to China.

"What is needed is a phased development program that draws the North Koreans out and opens them up," said C. Kenneth Quinones, an American aid worker who recently spent several days in Pyongyang, North Korea's capital. "But South Korea is doing a hodgepodge that is not going anywhere. The North Koreans are getting everything they need, without giving anything back."

The South Korean Unification Ministry likes to publicize the growth in inter-Korean travel and trade. But almost all the travel is from South Korea to North Korea. Much of the trade consists of South Korean gifts of rice to the North.

During the first six months of this year, 9,866 Koreans crossed the border for visits, a 74 percent increase over the same period of last year. But 9,545, or 97 percent, were South Koreans traveling to North Korea, compared with 321 North Koreans traveling to South Korea.

Those numbers do not count the 1,000 South Korean tourists a week who cross the demilitarized zone in buses to visit Mount Kumgang, a tourism enclave in the North. With minimal cost to North Korea, the resort was built with hundreds of millions of dollars invested by a South Korean company, Hyundai Asan. Even though North Korea levies a tourist tax estimated at $100 a head, South Korea's government promised in August to spend $2.6 million to build and pave roads in the area.

Mount Kumgang "is just a cash cow, it has no impact on the rest of North Korea," said Mr. Quinones, a former American diplomat who lived in Pyongyang in the mid-1990's.

...South Korea's government goes to great lengths to promote the image of reconciliation taking hold on the Korean peninsula.

In August, the two Koreas prepared to present a unified front to world television viewers, marching together behind a neutral "unification flag" at the opening ceremony of the Athens Olympics. But North Korea realized it did not have an athlete tall enough to match South Korea's flag bearer, a 6-foot-1 volleyball player named Koo Min Jung.

South Korea broke with protocol and agreed to let Kim Sung Ho, a North Korean coach, be a flag bearer. Mr. Kim, a 50-year-old former basketball player, is an inch taller than Ms. Koo. He also stood head and shoulder above most of North Korea's athletes, members of a generation whose growth was stunted during the famine of the mid-1990's.

Shiver.

Time for a reformation

Siege Prompts Self - Criticism in Arab Media

Muslims worldwide are the main perpetrators of terrorism, a humiliating and painful truth that must be acknowledged, a prominent Arab writer and television executive wrote Saturday, as Middle East media and officials expressed horror at the bloody rebel siege of a Russian school.

Unusually forthright self-criticism followed the end of the hostage crisis, along with warnings that such actions inflict more damage to the image of Islam than all its enemies could hope. Arab leaders and Muslim clerics denounced the school seizure as unjustifiable and expressed their sympathy.

Russian commandos stormed the school Friday in Beslan, Russia; it had been taken over by rebels demanding independence for Chechnya. Russian officials said Saturday that the death toll was in the hundreds -- many of them children.

Images of terrified young survivors being carried from the scene aired repeatedly on Arab TV stations. Pictures of dead and wounded children ran on front pages of Arab newspapers Saturday.

"Holy warriors" from the Middle East long have supported fellow Muslims fighting in Chechnya, and Russian officials said nine or 10 Arabs were among militants killed.

"Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," Abdulrahman al-Rashed, general manager of Al-Arabiya television wrote in his daily column published in the pan-Arab Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. It ran under the headline, "The Painful Truth: All the World Terrorists are Muslims!"

Al-Rashed ran through a list of recent attacks by Islamic extremist groups -- in Russia, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen -- many of which are influenced by the ideology of Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi-born leader of the al-Qaida terror network.

"Most perpetrators of suicide operations in buses, schools and residential buildings around the world for the past 10 years have been Muslims," he wrote. Muslims will be unable to cleanse their image unless "we admit the scandalous facts," rather than offer condemnations or justifications.

"The picture is humiliating, painful and harsh for all of us," al-Rashed wrote.

Contributors to Islamic Web sites known for their extremist content had mixed reactions on the hostage crisis, with some praising the separatists. Others wrote that people should wait until the militants had been identified before implicating Arabs in the drama.

Ahmed Bahgat, an Egyptian Islamist, wrote in his column in Egypt's leading pro-government newspaper, Al-Ahram, that hostage-takers in Russia as well as in Iraq are only harming Islam.

"If all the enemies of Islam united together and decided to harm it ... they wouldn't have ruined and harmed its image as much as the sons of Islam have done by their stupidity, miscalculations, and misunderstanding of the nature of this age," Bahgat wrote.

The horrifying images of the dead and wounded Russian students "showed Muslims as monsters who are fed by the blood of children and the pain of their families."

Mohammed Mahdi Akef, leader of Egypt's largest Islamic group, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said in general, kidnappings may be justified, but killings are not. He said the school siege did not fit the Islamic concept of jihad, or holy war.

"What happened yesterday is not jihad because our Islam obligates us to respect the souls of human beings; it is not about taking them away," Akef told The Associated Press.

Ali Abdullah, a Bahraini scholar who follows the ultraconservative Salafi stream of Islam, condemned the school attack as "un-Islamic," but insisted Muslims weren't behind it.

"I have no doubt in my mind that this is the work of the Israelis who want to tarnish the image of Muslims and are working alongside Russians who have their own agenda against the Muslims in Chechnya," said Abdullah.

An editorial in the Saudi English-language Arab News put some blame for the bloody end to the school siege on Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying he couldn't afford to lose his "tough-man image." But it added that "the Chechens, with the choice of their targets, had put themselves in a position where no one would shed tears when the punishment came. They reached a new low when they chose toddlers as bargaining chips."

Heads of state from Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait and Yemen offered their sympathy Friday to Russian officials and to the families of people caught up in the hostage drama. A prominent Muslim cleric also denounced it.

"What is the guilt of those children? Why should they be responsible for your conflict with the government?" Egypt's top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, was quoted as saying during a Friday sermon in Banha, 30 miles north of Cairo.

"You are taking Islam as a cover and it is a deceptive cover; those who carry out the kidnappings are criminals, not Muslims," Tantawi, who heads Al-Azhar University, the highest authority in the Sunni Islamic world, was quoted by Egypt's Middle East News agency as saying.

It's not a question of human rights

If you can believe the AP, mug shots of litterers

are posted on the Taipei government's Web site, along with an appeal to the public for help in identifying the messy offenders.

So far, four people are in the gallery of shame. There's an elderly man in brown-framed glasses and a blazer. A laughing man in his 30's who appears to show no contrition. And a man in his 20s who seems to be fleeing. All are guilty of flicking their cigarette butts on the ground, the city says.

Police snapped their photos because they refused to provide ID so that tickets could be issued, according to the Department of Environmental Protection's Web site.

But some think the city's policy, which began in May, is heavy handed.

"It's an obvious invasion of human rights," activist Wu Hau-jen told the Apple Daily newspaper. "I wonder which idiot came up with the idea."

I can't find the pictures, but this kind of reaction is typical selfish Taiwanese crap. It seems as if anytime you ask a Taiwanese to be public-spirited, they whine about human rights. Is the right to litter a basic human right? Oh, wait, that's in simplified characters, and anyway, it's from the UN, to which Taiwan doesn't belong. I'm sure if the commies let them in, Taiwanese conditions would be just as good as China's. (That's a joke, by the way. Despite its problems, Taiwan is a better place to live than China.)

靡不有初，鮮克有終

凡事都有個開始，但經常不了了之，沒個結果。Everything has a beginning, but some things never end. From the Odes 詩經.

Extreme ironing

Yeah, it's dumb, but I like it.

Movies again

I didn't cotton to Odd Man Out (1947), and didn't even finish it. The Interview (1998) was good, but not quite as good as I had expected (I made the mistake of reading the blurb.) Ghost World (2000) was hugely over-rated; I had thought I'd love it. Gosford Park (2001) was pretty good. In a meeting with an audience, one of the actors asks Altman if he's an American. Haw! And finally, Black Hawk Down (2001), which wasn't bad, particularly given that Jerry Bruckheimer was involved.

Three election sites

Tradesports, the Iowa markets, and the Electoral Vote Predictor. I suspect they're more reliable than polls.

THE END OF CONSERVATISM

I generally find Andrew Sullivan a little too shrill, but this is convincing and depressing:

...conservatism as we have known it is now over. People like me who became conservatives because of the appeal of smaller government and more domestic freedom are now marginalized in a big-government party, bent on using the power of the state to direct people's lives, give them meaning and protect them from all dangers. Just remember all that Bush promised last night: an astonishingly expensive bid to spend much more money to help people in ways that conservatives once abjured. He pledged to provide record levels of education funding, colleges and healthcare centers in poor towns, more Pell grants, seven million more affordable homes, expensive new HSAs, and a phenomenally expensive bid to reform the social security system. I look forward to someone adding it all up, but it's easily in the trillions. And Bush's astonishing achievement is to make the case for all this new spending, at a time of chronic debt (created in large part by his profligate party), while pegging his opponent as the "tax-and-spend" candidate. The chutzpah is amazing. At this point, however, it isn't just chutzpah. It's deception. To propose all this knowing full well that we cannot even begin to afford it is irresponsible in the deepest degree. I've said it before and I'll say it again: the only difference between Republicans and Democrats now is that the Bush Republicans believe in Big Insolvent Government and the Kerry Democrats believe in Big Solvent Government. By any measure, that makes Kerry - especially as he has endorsed the critical pay-as-you-go rule on domestic spending - easily the choice for fiscal conservatives. It was also jaw-dropping to hear this president speak about tax reform. Bush? He has done more to lard up the tax code with special breaks and new loopholes than any recent president. On this issue - on which I couldn't agree more - I have to say I don't believe him. Tax reform goes against the grain of everything this president has done so far. Why would he change now?

This is great. There are things about both candidates I dislike, and at least one of them has got to lose, right?

Does Globalization Work?

Arvind Panagariya reviews Martin Wolf's Why Globalization Works?

Flip a coin

THE UNPOLITICAL ANIMAL by LOUIS MENAND cites the political scientist Philip Converse's 1964 article on "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics"

Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system. He named these people “ideologues,” by which he meant not that they are fanatics but that they have a reasonable grasp of “what goes with what”—of how a set of opinions adds up to a coherent political philosophy. Non-ideologues may use terms like “liberal” and “conservative,” but Converse thought that they basically don’t know what they’re talking about, and that their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible “issue content” whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system.

Just because someone’s opinions don’t square with what a political scientist recognizes as a political ideology doesn’t mean that those opinions aren’t coherent by the lights of some more personal system of beliefs. But Converse found reason to doubt this possibility. When pollsters ask people for their opinion about an issue, people generally feel obliged to have one. Their answer is duly recorded, and it becomes a datum in a report on “public opinion.” But, after analyzing the results of surveys conducted over time, in which people tended to give different and randomly inconsistent answers to the same questions, Converse concluded that “very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying set of principles. These people might as well base their political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.

Findings about the influence of the weather on voter behavior are among the many surveys and studies that confirm Converse’s sense of the inattention of the American electorate. In election years from 1952 to 2000, when people were asked whether they cared who won the Presidential election, between twenty-two and forty-four per cent answered “don’t care” or “don’t know.” In 2000, eighteen per cent said that they decided which Presidential candidate to vote for only in the last two weeks of the campaign; five per cent, enough to swing most elections, decided the day they voted...

He mentions three theories, but this first one is my favorite:

The first is that electoral outcomes, as far as “the will of the people” is concerned, are essentially arbitrary. The fraction of the electorate that responds to substantive political arguments is hugely outweighed by the fraction that responds to slogans, misinformation, “fire alarms” (sensational news), “October surprises” (last-minute sensational news), random personal associations, and “gotchas.” Even when people think that they are thinking in political terms, even when they believe that they are analyzing candidates on the basis of their positions on issues, they are usually operating behind a veil of political ignorance. They simply don’t understand, as a practical matter, what it means to be “fiscally conservative,” or to have “faith in the private sector,” or to pursue an “interventionist foreign policy.” They can’t hook up positions with policies. From the point of view of democratic theory, American political history is just a random walk through a series of electoral options. Some years, things turn up red; some years, they turn up blue.

So awful it makes me laugh. Via aldaily

It's a miracle I found this article

Michael Shermer writes,

The Law of Large Numbers guarantees that one-in-a-million miracles happen 295 times a day in America.

Surprise!

Richard A. Posner writes,

it is almost impossible to take effective action to prevent something that hasn't occurred previously. Once the 9/11 attacks did occur, measures were taken that have reduced the likelihood of a recurrence. But before the attacks, it was psychologically and politically impossible to take those measures...

The problem isn't just that people find it extraordinarily difficult to take novel risks seriously; it is also that there is no way the government can survey the entire range of possible disasters and act to prevent each and every one of them...

Illustrating the psychological and political difficulty of taking novel threats seriously, the commission's recommendations are implicitly concerned with preventing a more or less exact replay of 9/11.

Absolutely. But we've got to blame someone.

Redaculous

Via Radley Balko:

They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

Redactions are "those portions that are blacked out or otherwise made unreadable". Groan.

Delusions I

Mindles H. Dreck links to a 2001 letter from TIMOTHY ROSCOE CARTER

I. Everything the US does is wrong. In a previous column, you asked: What should we do about a repressive regime?
Option 1) Military Aid. Obviously wrong. We are providing the weapons that kill the innocent. See Israel, Turkey, Columbia, Reagan-era Iraq, etc.
Option 2) Economic Aid. Wrong. We are financially propping up the regime. See Egypt, Indonesia, etc.
Option 3) Humanitarian Aid. Still Wrong. By relieving the regime of its financial duty to feed its people, we free up their money for military uses. See Afghanistan, where the US supported the Taliban by providing $43 million in humanitarian aid in exchange for the Taliban not exporting Heroin, thus sacrificing 12 million women to the alter of the failed War on Drugs.
Option 4) Trade / Constructive Engagement. Wrong. This is merely an excuse for US corporations to profit off of the regime's repression of its own people. See China and Reagan-era South Africa.
Option 5) Economic Sanctions. Wrong. The economic sanctions in Iraq have killed 6,000 people a month for the past 11 years, or nearly 800,000 victims of US foreign policy.
Option 6) Military Attack. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! See every military conflict that the United States has every engaged in. (Caveat: There may be a possible exception for the US Civil War, which will be considered obviously justified if you are talking to any white person born in the former Confederacy.)
Option 7) The Prime Directive. Wrong. It is intolerable for the most powerful nation in history to sit by and do nothing while thousands die. It probably stems from a racist lack of concern for people of color of persons of other religions. See Rwanda, Bosnia (not to be confused with Kosovo, which falls under Option 6, above).

II. The US gets all the blame, but never any of the credit.
When Lefties take a breather from blaming us for all the misery in the world, they sneer about how unfavorably we compare to Western Europe. So where would Western Europe be without past heavy-handed intervention by the United States? Without the US in WWI, WWII, the Marshall Plan, the Cold War? Ruled by Fascism, Nazism, or Communism? Or maybe still ruled by hereditary Monarchs? Personally, I see Europe and Japan as US success stories.

III. If you can't say something mean, don't say anything at all. Have you ever heard a Left opinion about Kashmir? There may be one, but I can't find it. In 1999, Pakistani forces entered Indian-controlled Kashmir. Two nuclear powers were shooting at each other, so I thought it was important. I tried to follow it in the news but no mainstream source was reporting anything about it. So I turned to Democracy Now! and other "alternative" sources. And I heard... Nothing. The blanket of "censorship" had covered them just like it had covered the corporate media. I had to spend weeks reading foreign sources on the internet for weeks to stay informed about how close my Indian brother-in-law was to being nuked. My conclusion: The Left is waiting for the US to pick a side, and then they can jump on the other. If we side with India, they can recycle all their Israel-Palestine opinions. If we side with Pakistan, they can search their many files of opinions on US support of military dictatorships to find the best ones to recycle. They could berate the US for not getting involved, but since this is an ongoing situation, they would then have to PICK A SIDE THEMSELVES, and say what the US SHOULD do. Better to wait for disaster to happen, and THEN criticize the US for not intervening. (For obviously racist reasons.)

Delusions II

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions by Leon de Winter

Anyone who follows the developments in the Arab Islamic world will be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge and introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and underdevelopment that plague most of the Arab world are the result of malicious machinations of Americans and Jews. This is no less true of the disaster in Darfur. Last week UPI reported that the Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail had told journalists in Cairo that his government possessed "information that confirms media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)." He added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli contacts with the rebels."

via aldaily

Old media

John R. Levine's Airline information on-line is far superior to the NYT article I mentioned below. In fact, it's clear the reporter doesn't know the half of it. Talk about old media.

poor peasants

Via the Gweilo Diaries: Policies, corruption widening rich-poor divide

One of the core problems, says [Wenran] Jiang, [professor of political science at the University of Alberta], is the two-class system that favours urbanites and urban development.

'The rural population is being exploited to subsidise the urban population,' he said.

Whereas most industrialised countries give big state subsidies to the agricultural sector, in China the reverse is true.

Farmers have four times the tax burden of city dwellers and none of the benefits available to many in the cities, such as subsidised education and health care and unemployment benefits.

And it is almost impossible for them to become official urban residents, though millions have migrated to cities for low-paying jobs with little legal protections.

'The Chinese government has made policy choices . . . that made the majority of Chinese people worse off, or relatively worse,' said Jiang. 'The consequences of such a policy choice, making most people poorer to let them subsidise urban development, are a potential time bomb for social instability.'

What's wrong with outsourcing?

Unlike NPR's morning edition, Marketplace identifies the Institute mentioned below as a nonprofit liberal research group, and goes on to interview Professor Lawrence White, who explains a CEO's job is to make a company more efficient, but that another problem is that while American CEO's are often over paid, the problem is that their pay doesn't have any connection to their performance. Neither White nor the study's author acknowledge that "outsourcing" jobs overseas is a minor problem.

outsourcing jobs overseas, or "offshoring," accounts for just a small fraction of the many millions of jobs that are lost each year even in a good economy.

...only 2.5 percent of major layoffs in the first three months of 2004 were a result of outsourcing abroad.

Over time, offshoring is beneficial:

In the short run, an increase in offshoring reduces U.S. job growth. But in the long run it improves the standard of living, increases real wages, and increases the country's economic growth.

...over the past decade the US economy lost an overall total of about 15 million jobs each year for all reasons, while creating an average of about 17 million new jobs each year - a huge rate of "churn" as countless businesses fail or downsize while others grow or are created.

...when companies move some jobs abroad the savings stimulate job creation at home...

In the initial phases of IT offshoring there is a loss of jobs, but the overall impact on the economy will be favorable. Because companies are paying lower costs, they have more money for investment which leads to an increased demand for labor. This does not indicate a 1-to-1 ratio of jobs gained to those lost, however the overall economy will benefit from offshoring.

...the US gains more from "insourcing" of jobs than it loses from outsourcing....in 2002, the most recent year on record, the US exported $29 billion in "business services" while importing less than $11 billion....the jobs that are being gained are generally higher-paying jobs than those that are being lost.

(Note that while these people are apparently willing to countenance "outsourcing" to other Americans, they feel it's wrong to let goddam foreigners have them.) What's wrong with outsourcing? Not much.