I agree with the Obama administration on this one. Corporations should not be allowed to move their operations overseas. If there is not a skilled labor force in this country from which to hire, corporations should call on our schools and our government to create the kind of educational system and incentives that will produce skilled Americans who can meet the demand.

-To make matters worse, tech leaders have been outraged by Mr Obama’s willingness to demonise employers for outsourcing work to foreign countries, which is especially popular within the IT industry, and by his grating sermons on the evils of corporate greed. “We’re praised for creating jobs, while being spanked at the same time,” complains Mark Heesen...-

Yes. You should spanked for your corporate greed. It is perfectly reasonable to expect entrepreneurs to pay back into the system that allowed them to create such success. Our current system reeks of thirty-odd years of corporations creeping into government and manipulating the rules, and bending, breaking or destroying regulations so as to maximize profit at the expense of the American people. It is even more reasonable to expect that to undo the damage, we will have to return to a system of tighter controls and the closing of loopholes that allow companies to get away with paying at or near 0% in taxes.

-Tech firms and venture capitalists welcome these initiatives, but are deeply frustrated by a lack of action in other areas. For instance, many cleantech start-ups and their backers were betting that Mr Obama would push through an energy bill that would force America to embrace alternative sources of energy more aggressively. But that came a cropper in the Senate.-

Right, because instead of strong-arming everything through the Senate, like the Republicans did for six years under Bush, Obama wanted to play the "reach across the aisle" game, to which nearly every single Republican spat back in his face. As a result, in two years, all we got was a mangled health care reform bill that, while a big step in the right direction, still allows huge insurance companies and pharmaceuticals to continue capitalizing on human suffering.

-In a speech in Silicon Valley, Mr Obama reiterated that he wants to create the conditions in America that would give rise to the next Google and the next Hewlett-Packard. But he will have to do much more to convince the tech industry that he really means it.-

Well, if the tech industry thinks that the path to doing that is to bringing in skilled labor from other countries, outsourcing jobs, and paying at or near 0% in net taxes, then the industry is delusional and needs a reality check. Discouraging immigration of skilled labor encourages the development of those skills in this country. Taxes generate the revenue that the government can use to create an educational system that trains people in those skills and provides incentives for people to leave colleges and universities with degrees in those field. Our current system is far too broken in this regard. Educational spending is far too low, the result of thirty years of Republicans blowing up the taxes on corporations and the richest 1%.

It seems to me that too many entrepreneurs have tunnel vision, asking "Why do I have to pay all these taxes?" and "Why can't I bring in the skilled labor I need from other countries?" The frame for these questions is self-centered. If the entrepreneur expands his frame of reference beyond himself to ask, "Who's paying to support society at this point in history?" and "Why can't I find the skilled labor I need in this country?" then the solutions to these problems become clear, and they require a progressive push even stronger than what Obama's achieved thus far.

In a vacuum, you might be right, but companies in the US increasingly compete on a global scale, and since other countries are more friendly to immigration of skilled professionals, we risk losing our global competitive edge. It's a nice idea to think that artificial barriers will result in us ramping up education, but that's a process that will take decades. You can't just start teaching advanced computer science to high school seniors who can barely read and struggle with basic math. So what's more likely is that the lack of skilled professionals in this country will gradually reduce our pace of innovation relative to other countries and cause a relative decline in our wealth, causing us to fall further and further behind.

It's far faster and more efficient to let the hoards of skilled professionals in other countries come here, especially since many of them are willing to risk almost anything to move their families here and would stay forever if we let them. Instead we severely restrict them and then we compound the problem by letting people come here to go to school and then make them leave if they can't find a job. It's the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

-In a vacuum, you might be right, but companies in the US increasingly compete on a global scale, and since other countries are more friendly to immigration of skilled professionals, we risk losing our global competitive edge.-

That there is a "global economy" and that this is somehow a new thing is a myth perpetuated by Milton Friedman's view of the "flat earth." What is a new thing is the USA relaxing tariffs and trade restrictions so that American companies can outsource work to other countries and not pay taxes on their goods if they manufacture them abroad. Besides that, there has been a "global economy" for many hundreds of years. It's at least as old as the British empire. What the US has been doing over the last thirty years has not so much been "opening markets", as it has been destroying our country's internal regulations that protect American workers from competing with the workers of foreign countries. In my opinion, such regulations were a good thing, and they built the strongest economic power the world had ever seen.

In brief, we don't have to compete on global scale if we choose not to. Your statement assumes that we do.

-It's a nice idea to think that artificial barriers will result in us ramping up education, but that's a process that will take decades.-

USA, 1945: "It's nice to think that if we eliminate artificial barriers to education, we'll have a skilled workforce that will build America into an industrial and economic superpower, but it would be easier to keep all the money in the hands of a few wealthy people. It would take decades to accomplish being an economic superpower, so it's really not worth the effort." I'm glad this wasn't the prevailing attitude then. I'm sure the country I live in would look a lot different.

-You can't just start teaching advanced computer science to high school seniors who can barely read and struggle with basic math.-

Again, reframing. The correct question is, "Why are so many American high school seniors barely able to read and struggle with basic math?" There are many facets to this problem, I'm sure, but I think a large chunk of the problem is that for many American families, there is a culture of anti-intellectualism. School, teachers and education are derided, and with this derision comes an unspoken message that being educated is not that important. And it's not just families. Our culture as a whole doesn't value education. Even in the tech industry, we have superstars Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg as the problem's biggest contributors -- they are both college drop outs, yet they are both ridiculously rich and famous.

I think that we could undercut this whole sociocultural phenomenon by having our government step in and do something really drastic, like waive the student loans of anyone who gets a tech degree and holds a job in the industry for some number of years. The more ridiculous the price of an education becomes, the more American teenagers you're going to have who feel that the path of least resistance to a good life doesn't lead through a university.

-So what's more likely is that the lack of skilled professionals in this country will gradually reduce our pace of innovation relative to other countries and cause a relative decline in our wealth, causing us to fall further and further behind.-

-It's far faster and more efficient to let the hoards of skilled professionals in other countries come here, especially since many of them are willing to risk almost anything to move their families here and would stay forever if we let them.-

The assumption made here is that we simply don't have enough skilled labor in this country to meet our demand, and that the only way meet it is to import that skilled labor. I disagree with you. I think we can easily create a social and economic environment conducive to creating the demand we need. Is importing it easier and cheaper? Yes. But it doesn't pay out in the long term.

Here's an example situation. Let's stay Startup X has one American engineer, but it needs fifteen more of him. For the sake of argument, let's say his skill set is utterly unique in the US. No one knows what he knows but him. So, Startup X needs fourteen more of him, but they don't exist in this country now. There do exist internationals with the skill set, and it would be really cheap to get the internationals to come over, and Startup X would have all the labor it needs within a matter of weeks. Cheap labor, lots of profit. The CEO is seeing dollar signs. But, his partner points out something else. They've got the one American engineer. The government just recently instituted a bunch of economic incentives for students who get tech degrees. Under the same bill, Startup X could also get money to pay the salaries of interns learning a skilled technology trade. Bingo! Their one American engineer could train the new engineers. Each of them might further innovate, have new ideas, form his own startup one day, and they'd be American startups. Yeah, it'll take longer. And, you might not be able to pay them the same as internationals. Since they're American, they're likely to have higher standards for pay. Oh, but right, I forgot. Using international labor is cheaper and faster, our country be damned.

Again, this kind of tunnel vision is really damaging to our industry, because all of the negative societal consequences of conservative economics come back around to bite us in the ass. If we keep addressing our problems with the same kind of thinking that caused the problems in the first place (lower taxes, fewer trade restrictions, etc.), we'll be perpetuating a vicious and dangerous downward spiral.

Your example would be a lot more compelling if it took into account a few factors:

1. For a large percentage of those internationals, making it easier to come here will mean that they will come here and stay, which means that all those potential benefits you say will accrue from the use of the hypothetical interns will also accrue from the internationals, only faster. I don't really understand this line in the sand you've drawn between "us" and "them", because what we're talking about is letting "them" become one of "us". Where is the harm in that, exactly?

2. Training interns is hard, hard work, doesn't scale as well as you seem to think, and often isn't feasible at all. Even if it is, it'll take forever, and Startup X very likely won't be around by the time those interns are competent.

I'm pretty sure you heard wrong.

http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/us_education_spending_20...

Usgovernmentspending.com looks like a great source of accurate, reliable information! </sarcasm>

I guess ad-hominem attacks are easier than actually downloading the spreadsheets yourself and crunching the numbers, right?

(Note: you can only download the spreadsheets for 2008 or earlier. 2009-2014 are marked as guesstimates, since official data is not yet available.