MT as the Economic Canary
I suppose there is no real mystery in why I almost killed my computer. After a painful $300 for a new power supply, I vowed to mend my ways and not leave the poor dear up and running endlessly--yet here it hums since I got it back home. The fact that I do this has always been a source of consternation to my kids--though not as much as the fact that I also tend to leave my browser going with a couple dozen tabs open to pages I feel moved to "do something" with, rather than squirrel them away in my data dump (AKA "Bookmarks"). I guess I think this is crucial information, so the tabs sit for a week or two until I make use of them or totally forget why they intrigued me. Undoubtedly, the trivia is the biggest reason for not being able to shut down my computer willy nilly.
To that end, I have a few seemingly related things that I think are bound to intersect--with each other and with us as MTs--and today is the day I get them out there, close the tabs, and move on.
First item (wow, I've been harboring this since May 4--no wonder my computer got tired!): Obama Cracking Down On Tax Havens:
The president's plan would limit the ability of U.S. companies to defer paying U.S. taxes on overseas profits. At the same time, Obama would step up efforts to go after evaders who abuse offshore tax shelters. Lost revenue isn't the only problem, Obama says. He contends the current system gives companies an incentive to invest overseas rather than creating jobs in the U.S.
"It's a tax code that says you should pay lower taxes if you create a job in Bangalore, India, than if you create one in Buffalo, N.Y.," Obama said Monday.
This was a promise going way back to the endless presidential campaign and anyone working in MT should have no trouble seeing that this might affect our livelihoods--hopefully, in a good way. At a time when more and more MTSOs are investing in infrastructure and personnel overseas, will this actually have an impact? Well, since I bailed on the accounting major, tax law is really Greek to me. Experience has taught me that weasels will always work the system to their advantage in ways that the rest of us honest suckers wouldn't even think of. Perhaps by buying physical assets offshore, they are cushioning the blow and that will exempt them from penalties. Perhaps by increasing their offshore personnel, they will simply be saving so much in payroll that any "penalties" (actually in the form of tax breaks no longer received) won't really have a negative impact on their bottom line.
While we're left to ponder why Americans' healthcare records are even allowed to be farmed out beyond our borders, we get this reaction to the president's plan from the greedy jerks in the business sector at large, led by that paragon of virtue, Micro$oft, who says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore:
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world’s largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama’s plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies’ foreign profits. “It makes U.S. jobs more expensive,” Ballmer said in an interview. “We’re better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S.”
Better off for who, Steve? I guess customers never have figured high on the agenda there. . . To help the clueless (like myself), a DC economist gives this lesson in US tax evasion via one of the currently legal loopholes:
Typically, he said, a company like Microsoft develops a product like Windows in the United States and deducts those costs against U.S. income. It then transfers the technology to a subsidiary in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower, without charging licensing fees. The company then assigns its foreign sales to the Irish subsidiary so it doesn’t have to claim the income in the United States.
“What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate,” Bosworth said. “Relative to where they are now, the administration’s proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part.”
Microsoft employed 95,029 people worldwide as of April 21, of whom 56,552 were based in the United States, according to the company’s Web site. The company announced it was firing up to 5,000 people in January while hiring some new workers; the company has shed about 1,000 jobs since then, spokesman Lou Gellos said.
Sweet, huh? The way I see it, these people are not so much talking about being hurt financially as they are about being told there is a finite point to their profits. In promising to fire even more US workers to even the score, they are adding insult to injury. They are selling out their own country. Welcome to the New World Order-- where they've leveled the playing field so we ALL live in third-world nations so that 5% of the population owns the other 95%. (The punchline will come when they realize there's no one left who can afford to buy.) I guess if we're outraged that hospitals are perfectly fine offshoring our health records just to save a few bucks, we might ask ourselves why we, as consumers, are perfectly fine buying products from companies that do likewise. The answer, I'm afraid is that we've grown lazy and apathetic. Remember when WalMart's sales pitch was that everything they sold was Made in America? Good luck finding US goods there today--but they're still turning a hefty profit.
I've already groused about the news that IBM has even come up with a computer application to maximize the benefits of offshoring jobs, but it bears repeating. Of course, once the patent application was leaked, they backpedaled and called it an "error," but I seriously doubt that means they aren't using it.
In their application to patent a "method and system for strategic global resource sourcing," five Hudson Valley IBMers describe how it weighs such plans as "50 percent of resources in China by 2010," against such factors as labor costs, infrastructure and the "minimum head count to qualify for incentives."
The application says the system weighs moving into or out of a particular country against criteria such as wages, political systems, "incentive contracts" and the economic impact of "violating and/or satisfying those incentives." In January, IBM reported that about 115,000, or 29 percent, of its global work force of about 400,000, is in the United States.
Of course, I still believe that the damage done by these tactics as it pertains to our livelihood is beyond the point of no return. Our work has been so devalued and our benefits so gutted that there is hardly room to get worse, and MTSOs are not likely to reverse and start restoring MT wages to where they were even 5 years ago--not when they're so heavily invested in the speech recognition technology they seem to think will eventually eliminate us. Indeed, in failing to put their collective foot down and catering to clients' fantasies of cheaper/faster/better, they've painted us all in a corner. This is why I've also predicted that the very technology they use to kill MT will soon after kill the MTSOs themselves, because the clients will be able to simply invest in the software and do it themselves.
Lest you scoff at me for my vivid imagination, there are those making even more astounding predictions--that the medical field in general will eventually suffer the same disintegration that beset the music industry.
Those of us who follow health care may be overlooking the big picture. Most of the profound (and sometimes disruptive) changes of the last half century -- computers, the Internet, social networks -- weren't initiated by the political process. They arose at the intersection of technology, economics, and mass social change. So here's something to think about: Could the medical profession go the way of the record industry?
Very interesting points made here, acknowledging that there will always be a place for MDs who excel, but the vast majority could easily be replaced by a P2P-style approach to healthcare that cuts them out of the loop entirely. Before you laugh it off, think of where you turn for medical issues. Do you have insurance? A hefty co-pay? Even if money isn't an issue for you, how many go straight to WebMD, eMedicine, or other favorite site? How many of those times does that answer your question well enough that an office visit isn't necessary at all? If you're like me, that's about 99% of the time.
You can see why I was so anxious to clean up my browser--it's quite a depressing little collection of "the sky is falling" schtuff that gets me thinking in circles--a lot like watching conspiracy videos on youtube all weekend. . . I guess my next order of business should be to keep an eye out for Pollyanna stories to balance these out, maybe a hint about how to protect ourselves once all this bad mojo hits the fan and MT just up and keels over on us once and for all. In an economy that is over three-quarters geared toward services instead of actual products, figuring out how to repackage our skills to is a tall order indeed. . .