Do understand that the top 1% do get taxed pretty heavily - they pay about 50% of all income taxes. However, I agree - too many loopholes are killing our tax system for the rich and middle class alike.

In other news, Bannedagain must be one of the worst debaters in VGC's history.

If you want to argue about this core problem, can you answer what percentage of new jobs created require advanced skills and more training?  There may be a shortage of workers on the higher end, but exactly what is being created to absord 60% of the population and get them work?  And the issue of why also goes back to ALL jobs, even skilled ones.  Why hire American IT workers, when you can get Indian IT workers for a much lower rate.  Is there ANY profession not impacted by globalization, unless the jobs can't be moved, because they are physically tied to a certain area?

Having worked as a software developer for many years now, I can with some level of authority that somewhere in the range of 80% of software projects that have been outsourced to India and/or China fail to meet the requirements, are low quality and unmaintainable, and demonstrate significant cost over-runs which make the project as expensive/more expensive than a project developed locally.

The reason for this is simple ... Developers in the western world are so lazy that we will put in many times as much effort into solving a problem once than repeatedly solving it over and over again, and as a result we steadily become more productive. Simply ask the average developer how much more productive frameworks and tools developed over the last decade have made them and how much less menial work they do to understand this. In contrast, the firms that you outsource work to are paid typically based on time and materials and there really isn't much incentive to be all that efficient; and (on top of this) the cost of managing a product developed in a different time zone in a different company often with language and cultural differences is significant.

Beyond this, the enitre nature of the industry is changing and we're moving away from large companies building their own widgets that they assemble into gigantic applications that monopolize a market to one where small companies share widgets and produce small applications in a highly competitive market. This change has made it impractical to "throw more developers" at a problem, and you need a handful of quality developers who can produce a solid product. While this would imply that we need fewer developers the opposite is true being that the number of projects that can be developed is unbounded being that you only need to focus on a viable niche that hasn't be saturated.

Similar changes are happening in several industies like the news and entertainment industries, but even clothing is changing. Today there are websites devoted to printing t-shirts with designs on them that were submitted by users and we aren't that far away from having tens of thousands of individuals/small companies making money as t-shirt designers.

We would be in a much better place if we just accepted that we're not going to be "manufacturing the t-shirt" or even "printing the design on the t-shirt" and realize that we will need to be the ones who "design the t-shirt and make the graphics that are displayed on it" and focus on royalties from intectual labour rather than wages from physical labour.

Having purchased thousands of dollars of dev work from Indians/Chinese, I can vouch for this.

Generally, the quality of coding work from 3rd world countries is just like their manufactured goods - crappy. The only way to really have quality Chinese/Indians doing work for you is to have an American or Westerner in charge of them all, ensuring that quality is up to snuff (which of course, employs Americans or Westerners with executive level salaries, ect). But again, it is some times easier and cheaper to simply pay an American, Candadian, Aussie, Greek or whomever I've hired before a $20-$25/hr wage to get work done in 5 hours as opposed to an Indian which is $10/hr but may take a week to get something done with shoddy coding that is rarely optimized.

The reality of industry is that as productivity rises, the ability for 1st world countries to automate production on durable goods will increase, thus absolving the problem of outsourcing jobs: Can their robots work cheaper than our robots? Not likely, nor enough to overcome shipping costs and the like. The real key, then, for job growth will be to ensure regulatory and tax structures are better than said countries, which as long as they are 3rd world, will suffer as they usually are steeped in corruption and undemocratic processes, which can discourage business.

Having purchased thousands of dollars of dev work from Indians/Chinese, I can vouch for this.

Generally, the quality of coding work from 3rd world countries is just like their manufactured goods - crappy. The only way to really have quality Chinese/Indians doing work for you is to have an American or Westerner in charge of them all, ensuring that quality is up to snuff (which of course, employs Americans or Westerners with executive level salaries, ect). But again, it is some times easier and cheaper to simply pay an American, Candadian, Aussie, Greek or whomever I've hired before a $20-$25/hr wage to get work done in 5 hours as opposed to an Indian which is $10/hr but may take a week to get something done with shoddy coding that is rarely optimized.

The reality of industry is that as productivity rises, the ability for 1st world countries to automate production on durable goods will increase, thus absolving the problem of outsourcing jobs: Can their robots work cheaper than our robots? Not likely, nor enough to overcome shipping costs and the like. The real key, then, for job growth will be to ensure regulatory and tax structures are better than said countries, which as long as they are 3rd world, will suffer as they usually are steeped in corruption and undemocratic processes, which can discourage business.

Having worked as a software developer for many years now, I can with some level of authority that somewhere in the range of 80% of software projects that have been outsourced to India and/or China fail to meet the requirements, are low quality and unmaintainable, and demonstrate significant cost over-runs which make the project as expensive/more expensive than a project developed locally.

The reason for this is simple ... Developers in the western world are so lazy that we will put in many times as much effort into solving a problem once than repeatedly solving it over and over again, and as a result we steadily become more productive. Simply ask the average developer how much more productive frameworks and tools developed over the last decade have made them and how much less menial work they do to understand this. In contrast, the firms that you outsource work to are paid typically based on time and materials and there really isn't much incentive to be all that efficient; and (on top of this) the cost of managing a product developed in a different time zone in a different company often with language and cultural differences is significant.

Beyond this, the enitre nature of the industry is changing and we're moving away from large companies building their own widgets that they assemble into gigantic applications that monopolize a market to one where small companies share widgets and produce small applications in a highly competitive market. This change has made it impractical to "throw more developers" at a problem, and you need a handful of quality developers who can produce a solid product. While this would imply that we need fewer developers the opposite is true being that the number of projects that can be developed is unbounded being that you only need to focus on a viable niche that hasn't be saturated.

I had also seen this happen first-hand, but it didn't stop the corporation I used to work for from going down the path to believe their "brilliant" management plus cheap labor equals success.  Code gets sent to the Indian developers, who then come back and use some code that was really questionable, and the error handling was very undeveloped.  Quick turn around but utter garbage.  But hey, the corporation felt they need it, so in an initiative they were advertising on national TV, they were simultaneously cutting funding to development in the area.  Next up, throw out all the workers, and then wonder why you can't find anyone who knows their proprietary stuff, which really has no use outside of their own internal use and projects.  So, you are let go?  Well, good luck finding anything else.  As far as brilliance goes, the corporation considered Unix System Admin on part with computer operators.  Back in the day, before the outsourcing madness brought on by Y2K, the department in the Unix area would go out every week for lunch.  It seemed nice for team building.  Well, it was done because they were losing someone else in that area.  

But hey, what I do I know, they have to be booming now.  They are multinational after all.

Its the business cycle. If their Indians are providing really shoddy code, it will eventually come back to bite them in the rear significantly. If it lasts long enough, they may have significant problems with deliverables and will eventually have to re-hire Americans, or may just go belly-up.

One thing that happens in corporate environments is that managers and executives who do such cutting corners get praised for driving costs down, and then they move on to other things, and someone else has to pick up the pieces.  I do know the company in question I have described is on a mission to gut its workforce of American workers at this point, so they wonder why their frontline managers have problems finding people.  Well, disrespect your workforce and they don't stick around.  Who ends up biting the bullet isn't management, it is shareholders long-term.  Well, they the ones drive for NOW results, so maybe it is what goes around, comes around.