Say Anything Blog

Remember all that flaming rhetoric about “off shoring” during the 2004 elections?  Well, it turns out that the dire predictions made by John Kerry, among others, were totally unfounded.

Most famously, then-candidate John Kerry issued a statement denouncing what he called “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who shipped U.S. jobs overseas. The airwaves and cables fairly hummed with angry talk about offshoring.

And what happened next? Nothing.

Nothing, that is, like the massive outflow of jobs that many feared. Employment growth, which had been notably slow after the 2001 recession, picked up in the United States. (We’ve gained more than five million jobs since early 2004.) Recruiters who specialize in information-technology workers say they have more openings than they can fill.

And as a hot-button headline issue, offshoring appears to have gone the way of Y2K and the Red Menace. File it under N, for Not as Big a Deal as We Thought.

Yes, some still see offshoring as a threat, sort of. A Brookings Institution report last week said some metropolitan regions with lots of high-tech employment could see as many as 4.3 percent of their jobs go overseas. (Philadelphia isn’t so vulnerable - the Brookings report estimates our potential losses at 2.5 percent at the most.)

But most economists who’ve looked at the issue rate the long-run economic impact of offshoring as either (1) minimal, or (2) positive. Using overseas workers to save money or boost productivity generally results in better or cheaper services, which in turn leads to more competition, more innovation, and growth.

Something tells me that these facts won’t stop people like North Dakota’s own Byron Dorgan, among other big-government protectionists, from bemoaning free trade.