[hackthemack]

Ross Perot in 1992

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRr60nmDyu4

We have shipped millions of jobs overseas, and ... a strange situation, we have a process in Washington where after you serve for a while, you can cash in, become a foreign lobbyist.

We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.

You're paying 12, 13, 14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the Border, pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care. That's the most expensive single element making a car. Have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement and you don't care about anything but making money.

There will be a giant sucking sound going south.

[freedomben]

Indeed, this was one of the first things I thought of too. I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently used to dismiss his views. I'll never forget talking with an educated Perot voter (a friend of mine) at the time and actually being confronted with the real views, not a shallow strawman, and realizing I didn't have any good answers because I hadn't actually thought about it. That was a good maturation point for me when I started realizing the power (and danger) of bubbles.

[potato3732842]

>I remember well the jokes about Perot being crazy, frequently used to dismiss his views.

Was he crazy or was he made to look that way as an excuse to dismiss his views? Sitting here in the 2020s knowing what we know now about "how it all works" it sure does cast a lot of doubt upon the past.

[brightball]

I had a similar experience when I learned about Ron Paul back around the 2008 election. It was also the first time I had my eyes opened to information suppression when Fox News edited some of his answers out of rebroadcasts of debates.

[HarHarVeryFunny]

He was't crazy, just thin-skinned and not suited for politics.

[commandlinefan]

> the jokes about Perot being crazy

I remember the debates around the time, though, and what most people said was that shipping manufacturing jobs out of the united stated would actually create prosperity here so that the manufacturing types could "move up" into less menial work. They're saying the same thing now, and although it _does_ seem that that did happen in the 90's when all the manufacturing jobs went offshore, it doesn't seem to be happening now.

[ecshafer]

One of my main arguments for a universal health care scheme in the united states is how horrendously expensive, for employers, health care is. Lets totally ignore efficacy, moral arguments, expense for the patient, etc. If you are a company in the US a large percentage of the effective compensation of employees is healthcare. A moderately good PPO is like ~$10k+ a year per employee. You can pay workers in some other countries less than just the cost of paying for health insurance for a US employee.

[jonhohle]

As someone paying for a family on a marketplace bronze plan, that’s a bargain! I think our premiums will exceed $20K this year.

With all of the medical group consolidation, all of the wait time woes our Canadian friends always complained about are the reality here now as well. So I’m paying more than anywhere else on the world and have to wait 6 months for a PCP appointment. We have the worst of both worlds.

[bluedino]

> One of my main arguments for a universal health care scheme in the united states is how horrendously expensive

The costs need to be fixed, first. Moving to the government/taxes paying for it doesn't fix that.

[baal80spam]

Asking as not an American - $10k per year, how much % of a yearly salary is it?

In Europe (here: Germany example), which is frequently seen here as the ideal example of healthcare spending:

Employees and employers typically split around 14.6% of gross salary for public health insurance. [1]

[1] https://feather-insurance.com/blog/germany-healthcare-statis...

[Imustaskforhelp]

The irony of the situation when you realize that you can probably get healthcare yourself in India (not sure about other countries) but for even a very good healthcare program to be around 25$ per month

And that 10k$/year can be considered middle class / heck I can even argue just slightly above middle class in India

And you can actually enjoy food and a lot of things really cheap as well

Usually the only problem becomes if something is inherently expensive (think college or land) which is where PPP does hurt but in everyday life, I think India's decent to live in.

Now I want to ask you but even if someone spends around ~$10k+ a year, even then I have heard people describe american healthcare subpar. Like why? Is it just corruption at healthcare level and lobbying efforts?

Is there truly nothing that the average american can't do about to make things better for the healthcare situation. To me its feeling like america's moving even backwards right now from cutting medicaid putting even more strain on the amount and still even on the average person themselves as well.

[potato3732842]

It's like every other compliance cost. It hurts the little guys more than the big guys. Too much of the US economy is big players so the status quo persists.

[dfxm12]

It's a price to, in a way, handcuff workers. Systemically combined with policies that make sure unemployment doesn't get too low, weaken labor power, tie other benefits to employment, etc. Workers know they need your job to have affordable healthcare, so they have no choice but to stick with it even if it is somewhat crappy.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

"how horrendously expensive, for employers, health care is."

So why aren't they pushing for abolishing employer-based health insurance? They had no problems getting rid of pensions but for some reason nobody really lobbies for employers to get out of the health care business. The same for 401k. Why do companies have to manage those instead of just contributing some money and let the employees find the right package on the open market?

It's really weird.

[mrguyorama]

And yet they never lobby for nationalized health care.

Because "Deal with our illegal, immoral, or stupid work requests or literally lose your healthcare" is such a massive bargaining chip for them.

They would rather spend more money and have more docile and controllable workers, but not spend that money on paying workers more to be docile and controllable.

It's not about the money.

[stocksinsmocks]

We almost do. Employers must provide insurance. If you’re unemployed you can probably get Medicaid. We have private entities handle the details instead of something that looks like the Post Office. There is nothing anyone in Congress can do which results in all 8 billion people on Earth having instant access to all conceivable treatment in any location the the US. Like socialized medicine, there is no meaningful price discovery mechanism in the US. Unlike socialized medicine, it’s a lot harder for political parties to conduct pogroms by rationing resources and euthanizing demographics that don’t vote the way they like.

[tokai]

Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign actors. Unless we want to return to mercantilism a global empowerment of organized labour globally is the only real way to fix this.

[K0balt]

This assumes that leadership has a vision beyond the next quarterlies. Offshoring is seen as a solution to organized labor, unfortunately.

Exec compensation above a reasonable salary needs to to tied somehow to longer term outcomes.

[naasking]

> Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign actors.

Or it's a great way to spur innovation in automation, which has other beneficial downstream effects. This is what people always seem to forget to consider, and I don't know why.

[commandlinefan]

> companies being outcompeted by foreign actors

I've been hearing this since the early 90's, and I'm still not seeing any evidence that it's true.

[burnt-resistor]

That's like rich people threatening to leave if taxes are raised. It's always a bluff.

And, the cheapest labor is slave labor like Dubai and the US (via prison labor in current use by multiple major corporations) use already. If there's no floor of standards, that creates perverse incentives and ridiculous instability.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> Not sending production to the place with the cheapest labour is great way to have your companies being outcompeted by foreign actors

This is is a fallacious argument. Most or even all of those places couldn't have hoped to out-compete the domestic companies without the traitorous companies shipping complete factories to them. The reason the Soviets didn't outcompete us wasn't down to just incentive structures (though that was part of it), quite alot of their failure was down to being locked out of the market on machine tools.

[larme]

It’s true that American companies have benefited from sending jobs overseas. Instead of trying to stop them, perhaps we could explore ways to share this money more fairly across the country.

[toomuchtodo]

Everyone in business seems allergic to "pay domestic workers living wages and provide flexible working arrangements with good work life balance" so we will only arrive there through politics, unions, and structural labor shortages as the prime working age population cohort continues to shrink, imho.

Honorable mention to Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio for introducing legislation to tax outsource payment flows.

The HIRE Act: 25% tax on outsourcing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45161419 - September 2025

Ohio senator introduces 25% tax on companies that outsource jobs overseas - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45146528 - September 2025

(US centric perspective)

[cl0ckt0wer]

We did, by lowering prices and returning shareholder value.

[bee_rider]

If we had some tariffs that somehow just canceled out the exploitation (of people and the environment), that could be interesting. “Stop sending jobs overseas” is too blunt, create a fair international market and let winners win.

But, I don’t think anyone is naive enough to propose such a thing seriously. It is impossible to believe that some administration wouldn’t use it for political favors.

[rs999gti]

> create a fair international market and let winners win.

Why? It's selfish, but since the US and EU sent jobs out to India and China. India and China, have created protections that make getting those jobs back nearly impossible short of stopping payments. At the same time, these countries have huge trading imbalances (see FR complaining that their CN trade imbalance is untenable) and have become the defacto for cheap labor.

[hackthemack]

Side point about this HN post "Jensen: 'We've done our country a great disservice' by offshoring" currently 3 hours and 129 points

Why does it seem like it is getting pushed down relative to other posts that have less upvotes and with longer times?

Here are some posts that are currently higher ranked.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46445412 currently 8 hours and 82 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465493 currently 4 hours and 29 points

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497589 currently 5 hours and 82 points

It does not make sense unless some force is pushing the Jensen post down, or the other posts up?

[bee_rider]

Doesn’t HN have some system for lowering threads that have, like, acrimonious voting patterns? Under the assumption that they are producing more entrenched argument, instead of informing discussion.

[emchammer]

The dignity of three presidential candidates who disagree with each other, sitting quietly while allowing the other to finish using their allotted time…

[hshdhdhj4444]

And yet the timeframe Huang mentions does not go beyond 20 years ago, indicating his statement is little more than political posturing.

Also, last I saw, he wasn’t prevented from speaking at any point in those past 2 decades and I don’t remember any mention from him about these issues despite the fact that there’s been bipartisan concerns about manufacturing in China for at least a decade.

It’s almost like he’s trying to position his company’s profit growing enterprises as a part of helping the poorest Americans to justify the U.S. taxpayer paying for a lot of it, or at least assuming all downside risk…

[baal80spam]

Who would've listened to (or even knew about) Jensen Huang before ChatGPT?

[potato3732842]

>And yet the timeframe Huang mentions does not go beyond 20 years ago, indicating his statement is little more than political posturing.

20yr ago you could at least plausibly lie to yourself and say that things were ok. The seeds were sown back in the late 60s early 70s at least. Fair amount of gas was put on the fire in the 80s.

[NoSalt]

I voted for Ross. Sad he didn't win.

[casey2]

Fatten up the pig, then carve it can you fatten it up again?

American leaders lost hope in Americas ability to build the future. They decided this was as good as it's going to get and squoze the people at every level with unproductive IT, bureaucracy, consumerism. This country doesn't have a workforce capable of building the future anymore, it's dropouts and druggies the lot of them.