Kerry says outsourcing inevitable
Yesterday, during the second US Presidential debate, Senator John Kerry, leader of the anti-offshoring Democratic party, stated for the record that "You can't stop all outsourcing."
GIBSON: Senator, I want to extend for a minute, you talk about tax cuts to stop outsourcing. But when you have IBM documents that I saw recently where you can hire a programmer for $12 in China, $56 an hour here, tax credits won't cut it.
KERRY: You can't stop all outsourcing, Charlie. I've never promised that. I'm not going to, because that would be pandering. You can't.
But what you can do is create a fair playing field, and that's what I'm talking about.
President Bush responded that a committee had looked at the issue and said Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, now a senior executive in Citigroup, had said that stopping outsourcing "won't work."
Kerry said he wanted to plug loopholes that give American companies incentives to ship jobs out of the country. In this context, he also pointed to declining American educational standards...
"India and China are graduating more graduates in technology and science than we are," Kerry said.
Bush maintained that if America wanted to keep jobs there should be "less regulations, legal reform if we want jobs here and we've got to keep taxes low.
"The best way to keep jobs in America is, one, to have an energy plan. I proposed one to the Congress two years ago...It's stuck in the Senate," Bush said.
View the entire debate transcript here.
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