“High-Skilled” Is The Key

President Barack Hussein Obama said, in March, 2009, that it wouldn’t be good for the economy for the outsourced jobs to come back to the US, that they should stay outside the country because they are cheap jobs. Obama said that he would work on creating high-skilled, high-paying jobs, which cannot be off-shored.

Obama said:

It probably wouldn’t be good for our economy for a bunch of these jobs to come back because, there’s no way that people could be getting paid a living wage on some of these jobs — at least in order to be competitive in an international setting.

Obama said nothing about the difference between outsourced jobs and off-shored jobs.

Now one of Obama’s campaign planks is to criticize Mitt Romney for, Obama claims, outsourcing jobs. Both Obama and vice president Joe Biden are attacking Romney for “outsourcing” jobs to other countries. Obama is currently running a campaign advertisement that calls Mitt Romney the “Outsourcer-In-Chief.” Obama’s reelection campaign released three new ads on Tuesday, June 26, 2012, escalating attacks on Mitt Romney’s outsourcing of American jobs while leading private equity firm Bain Capital.

“High-Skilled” is the key. In the Eagles song “Desperado” (written in 1973 by Don Henley and Glenn Fry), there is this line: “You been out ridin’ fences for so long.” I think that the cited line says it all. Cowboys have been riding (checking) fences for years. They first did it on horses, but now do it mostly in 4-wheel drive vehicles. When cowboys started, caring for horses were high-skilled jobs. Shoeing horses and making saddles were, indeed, high-skilled jobs. But technology advanced and high-skilled jobs changed. Caring for horses is no longer a high-skilled job. Instead, the design and manufacture of 4-wheel drive vehicles is high-skilled. Riding fences is still necessary, but how it is done has changed.

I must agree with Obama (even though it hurts me to say it) on the low-skilled, low paying jobs, and his lack of effort to bring them back.

So now it is up to Mitt Romney to point out what a hypocrite Obama is concerning outsourced jobs. And it is incumbent upon Romney to explain that what used to be a high-skill job can, through the advancement of technology, become a low-skill job that is subject to being outsourced.

But that’s just my opinion.

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