Outsourcing labor is a serious danger to America's economy and needs to be dealt with.

"I find it a very false statement that i only take into account the short term…Offshoring in general is dated as being about 30 years of age." From my perspective, 30 years /is/ short term. Remember my first argument? Still holds true. We're only losing so much money a year, and even as the economy is slowly shrinking, we've got an economic boom because buying power is up and people are investing. But we're already seeing the beginnings of that problem I mentioned-- that at a point, there is just less money to go around, and people can't afford products any more. Then you see companies looking to lower prices to sell to a market that now can afford less. I address your other point about not losing money later. "So if we'd really get poorer by paying foreigners to make goods for us, we wouldn't do it, that would make no sense. So, the opposite is even true: the foreign trade makes us richer. We get something we value more than what we gave for it." Corporations don't have to make sense. They're in it for the short-term profits. Don't believe me? 80% of the world's firms grow less than 5% a year. (The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits And Good Growth) And as the book elaborates, this isn't because they can't grow, it's because they can make a massive profit and then run for the hills instead. Think Enron. Or all those companies whose products have been recalled recently. That's not a mistake, they knew fully well what they were getting into when they outsourced to cheap, Chinese companies. But they risked it because they knew they could make a massive amount of money before they'd get caught. Of course, that isn't to say that groups can't mutually benefit, but they certainly can't in a one-sided relationship like the US has with its trade partners. I mean, in 2007, our trade deficit was $711.6 billion. (http://www.census.gov...) That is to say, we spend $711.6 billion more than we get from trade. And you might mention that our trade deficit's been decreasing a little. So I'll cite one of your own quotes to refute this. As you said of our exports: "27% is resource exports … 49% of the total and so by far the largest part [is capital goods]" Capital goods are goods used in the production of consumer products. They're not raw materials, exactly, but they're factories, tools and machines. So our "by far the largest" export are the factories we build to produce our own imports. And actual consumer goods (no shame in wikipedia, by the way) make up only 15% of our total exports. In fact, the only reason our trade deficit is decreasing is because we're selling other countries the materials to build the factories they will then use to produce our goods. At a point, the rate at which we build factories overseas will level off and we'll lose that 49% of our exports. 27% is just the raw materials they use to make our products. 9% is food, which has a very low markup. And for the record, technology does not equal wealth. Wealth is money and resources. "there are only reasons to asume that the economy will improve: we need to pay less for getting the same, so we have more left over to invest/spend." Which is great for a time, but eventually the fact that we're slowly losing money catches up with us. And sure, the economies we export to will have a higher demand, but it's for goods with very little profit. Look at Japan. Japan exports a lot of high-tech, high value-added products to the US but has barriers against the export of US high-value products in Japan. http://minneapolisfed.org... In many cases, these countries are actively taking advantage of us. Japan is making a huge profit off us because they sell us high profit products, but they have embargos preventing us from sending them high profit products, so we make very little money from them. We lose money, and they benefit hugely. Again, even if American labor is productive, it's still cheaper to hire less productive people and just hire more of them. Otherwise you wouldn't see our jobs being sent overseas. "Do you know the comparative advantage principle?" Yes I do, and it'd work out quite nicely for the US if they exported product worth the same amount as the product they import. But they don't and we get a trade deficit. For that matter, we aren't importing low-value, labor-intensive products like you suggest. We import more sophisticated electronics and communications equipment. (http://usinfo.state.gov...) Which leaves me wondering, if we import both low value and high value products, what do we produce? "About the safeguarding. I didn't get what you meant…If a country stops buying your goods, it's because you can't offer them at the same level (quality/price) as others." Yeah, you definitely didn't get what I meant. No offense. I was too vague. I was referring to an economic depression. Say a country we export to has a war or a depression or something. We can't export goods to them, but we still need to support ourselves. However, we don't have any of our own factories, so we keep importing. Without the money from our exports to support buying our imports, we end up in a depression pretty quickly. This wouldn't be a problem if we had our own factories. "The US doesn't pay foreign workers in dollars, they pay them with yen, yuan, euro... that were bought with dollars on the market." See, that's kind of the problem. The American dollar is oftentimes much more stable then their own currency, so they squirrel it away a good part of the time. When they aren't just running off with it, they use it to buy American infrastructure and stocks and whatnot. Which is kind of bad. Because if the United Arab Emirates own half of America's ports, then the profits from half of America's ports go not to America, but to the United Arab Emirates. And we lose a lot of our income that way, too. "About the less wealth to pay with: almost my whole post up to now showed that there will be more wealth." Okay. People buy our infrastructure, and take off with the profits from the fees involved with allowing boats to come to port and whatnot. Which is profit that America doesn't get. Less wealth, right? "unemployment rates: they are more or less constant (even more then before offshoring came kicking in)" But it depends on the type of unemployment. In the past, short-term unemployment was high, long-term unemployment was quite low. Short-term unemployment is when someone is between jobs. Long-term unemployment is when someone's entire career is gone, and they end up out of work for extended periods of time. That's the dangerous kind of unemployment because that's when they end up depleting their savings and stop buying things. "Then about not having all those regulations…i don't see why those limitations should be introduced." Because, I, for one, am not fond of antifreeze in my toothpaste. Not to mention the ethical concerns involved with paying people below poverty wages and denying them benefits if they get injured on the job and the like. But really, safety of American consumers is generally a good reason for regulations, right? I'm not acting like the government can decide quality, I just think it's the government's responsibility to make sure products aren't dangerous. "Government doesn't spend because of the private sector" Yes, it does. Because the private sector effects the things the government spends on. My company offshores, leaving thousands unemployed. The government gives unemployment checks to them until they can get back on their feet. Offshoring increases government spending. About your response to my countermeasures: Great. Add high tariffs, then. Works quite well for Japan. They're very self-sufficient and still make plenty of money.