Outsourcing 101 for Dummies (Politicians)

"A lawmaker from Washington State might be told something like this: Indian outsourcing companies may funnel some Seattle-area technology jobs to India, but with the affluence that creates in India, more and more Indians are flying. That has made India a huge buyer of Boeing aircraft and thus a creator of jobs in the Seattle area, where Boeing does much of its manufacturing."

From today's NY Times article "Lobbying in U.S., Indian Firms Present an American Face." Here's more:

In the heat of the 2004 presidential race in the United States, John Kerry compared outsourcing to treason, Lou Dobbs harangued against it on CNN and the Indian outsourcing vendors were left scrambling. As the 2008 campaign starts to pick up speed, the Indian outsourcing companies have returned to Washington as veritable insiders, slicker and better connected than ever.

They have hired a former official in the Bush administration as a lobbyist. They are humanizing the issue by bringing Americans they have hired into meetings with politicians. The Indian companies are mounting this effort out of fear that the pressures of the presidential election, and of the Democratic primaries especially, will induce candidates to lash out at Indian vendors.

Bottom Line: India's National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) now has to spend millions of dollars educating American politicians on the basic economic principles of how voluntary trade and outsourcing is a mutually beneficial and win-win outcome, and how the dollars spent on outsourcing in India end up getting spent back in the U.S. Shouldn't they have learned this in high school economics?