Outsourcing: Let’s try it the other way around

A Bush administration economic expert commented recently on the beneficial effects of today’s international trade agreements.

On balance and over the long haul, she suggested, it would be a good thing to buy from abroad goods formerly produced domestically.

The official used the newly coined and immediately and widely embraced word for it: “Outsourcing.” The argument is that buying or producing goods more cheaply from overseas is more profitable and makes more money available for investments and improved technology at home. And it also enables foreign producers and workers to buy more of our products.

All this might sound pretty impressive when bantered around in the big business boardrooms and on the Foggy Bottom cocktail circuit.

But “outsourcing” must have a far different connotation in the unemployment lines of those thousands of North Carolinians — and others — who have seen plants in which they have invested their entire working careers move overseas or simply close.

If “outsourcing” is such a good idea and so beneficial to our people, perhaps the president and Congress should reconsider their stand on allowing our people to buy their medicines from Canada where the same medications are sold at much cheaper prices.

Millions of our citizens, especially those now unemployed and the elderly, find themselves desperately in need of some “insourcing”!

Published in Editorials on March 2, 2004 11:45 AM