Senator Charles Schumer is either an economic ignoramus, or he is just performing the usual Democrat/Socialist Party obeisance to the welfare state and labor union extortion.
New York’s Senator Charles Schumer wants to impose a punitive tax on all American companies that employ overseas call centers for customer support.
“English speaking workers, whether they are in Indonesia, Canada, the Philippines, South Africa, are willing to work longer hours for lower wages and as a result Americans lose their jobs,” Schumer said.
How will job creation be improved in the United States by raising businesses’ costs? Will businesses be more able to compete in global markets and protect jobs in the United States? How will consumers be helped when businesses have to raise their prices to cover the new taxes and related costs?
More fundamentally, Senator Schumer has the causation backwards.
Jobs outsourcing would not have become a problem without the Democrat/Socialist Party’s socialist welfare state. Americans don’t lose jobs to outsourcing because foreign workers have lower wages. We lose them because the political welfare state and socialist labor unions have driven the total cost of labor in the United States completely out of line with the rest of the world. The demise of our auto industry is the most egregious recent example.
If Democrat/Socialists really want to help American workers, they will drastically reduce costs of government to levels that can be supported by tax rates enacted under the George W. Bush administration. Raising taxes and imposing crippling new regulations, as the Democrat/Socialist Party lusts to do, will force more layoffs and curtail creation of new jobs. Under President Obama’s proposed massive increases in taxes, resulting job losses will dwarf the trickle that is represented by overseas call centers.
Our educational system, degraded under liberal-progressive influence since the 1960s, also bears a large share of the blame. The truth is that Indian schools, for example, graduate better trained students, who speak better English, than do our own schools. Outsourcing jobs is one of the prices for entrenching the teachers’ unions, whose members regard the schools as a source of entitlements for themselves, rather than as institutions in which it is their calling to educate students.
To be truly serious about helping average Americans, Democrat/Socialists must rescind labor union monopolistic privileges that make firing incompetent teachers essentially impossible. And they must cut salaries and benefits down to the levels prevailing in the private sector.
Putting the unjustly privileged unions on the same level as non-union private business employees would be a true step in the direction of the social justice they pretend to advocate. And it would facilitate the survival of the United States in an economically competitive and politically hostile world.
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