Mitt Romney’s Lies To Get Around Outsourcing
Outsourcing. Not actually bad. Photo by by Paul Keller.
There’s a big debate in the states about Mitt Romney lying that he wasn’t involved with Bain Capital during a time when he was the sole stockholder, Chairman and CEO. And signing stuff and going for meetings. Which is a strange thing to lie about, but the reason is that he’s trying to disassociate from work that company did during that period, which including outsourcing. For any business in the world this is part of productive operations. And governments know this. But around election time, it suddenly becomes taboo. But outsourcing actually isn’t that bad. For anybody.
Three economists examined 58 U.S. manufacturing industries from 2000 to 2007, and found an economic upside to offshoring—not just for American companies, but for American workers themselves.
The study found that offshoring tends to increase productivity and reduce costs, which can prompt firms to expand domestic hiring enough to offset the jobs lost to workers overseas.
“Offshoring has no effect on native employment in the aggregate,” the authors said. “While o?shore workers compete directly with natives, their employment generates productivity gains that ‘increase the size of the pie,’ leading to an overall neutral impact on native employment.” (Washington Post)
It’s weird, rather than telling the hard truth about outsourcing not actually being a… bane to the US economy, he’s telling an impossible lie that someone could own and be the boss of a company and still not have any responsibility for what it does. Kinda a tough sell for a Presidential candidate.
I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and 
I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the 
In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from 
The chutzpah of this government knows no bounds. Every government since Independence has had to balance placating Sinhala nationalists (AKA racists) while at the same time actually running a sensible, inclusive nation that doesn’t send minority citizens, capital and foreign investment fleeing. Basically, they’ve had to pay lip service to nationalists while at the same time trying to run an actual nation. Every government has also generally failed, SWRD being killed by a nationalist monk and everyone after almost losing the country to various rebellions. In that context Mahinda is actually doing a better job by virtue of not being dead and not losing control of the country. But he’s still not doing a good job.
Americans are racist and that makes them irrational. Arguing with them is pointless. They won’t understand rational studies like the one you wrote about.