Ben Stein says that taxes has to be raised on the rich....

[Mr Khan]

Soleron said:

Mr Khan said:

Soleron said:

Mr Khan said:

What we need to do is disincentivize plunder. Impose penalties for companies that ship jobs overseas (by penalizing them salary/wages + benefits + 20% of every worker they outsource in that fiscal year, so that not only do they not save on outsourcing, they pay more than they would have otherwise)

What. You're deliberately making the economy less efficient, and hence lowering the world standard of living, just to save American jobs?

I'm not against free trade as such, but we can't just have companies ruining livelihoods in their quest to make a buck either.

Perhaps we could force companies to pay for the retraining of workers they have fired due to outsourcing, to enable them to get a new career?

Those people made the wrong choice of career. The supply/demand balance shifted so that their demands for $40k salary are now far overpriced compared to the $10k demand in another country.

The two ways I would solve outsourcing are: 1) full workers' rights and social security in developing countries, to raise their cost of employment to something appropriate, 2) remove import duties, uneven world taxation and other factors that make the cost of living so much higher in the US for the same basket of goods, thereby increasing foreign wage demands. That way a US worker can compete with a Chinese one on an even basis. If there is any retraining to be done it should be via government-provided free university tution or vocational courses for anyone who is unemployed.

Given the pace of the world economy, you can't just say "oh, they fucked up, it's their problem." How the hell could you expect, say, a US Steel worker who signed on in 1950 when he was 20, and was fired when the industry went belly-up in this country in 1980 at age 50, too early to retire, too late to retrain, and so "oh well, you should have been clairvoyant enough to see this coming 30 years ago."

Now in this case, it's hard to blame companies that tried their best and failed, but it's much easier to blame companies that just leave behind workers to line their own pockets.