The photograph – apparently taken in late summer of 2008 (it’s undated, but that’s when the story it accompanies was published), when the economy was teetering on the edge of catastrophe – says it all. There’s Charlie, in a tux, holding his award for his awesome outsourcing work. LOL
Today’s Globe has most of the key details. In brief: in the course of his work at Harvard Pilgrim, Baker outsourced most of Harvard Pilgrim’s IT work to Perot Systems (yes, that Perot). Nothing wrong with that, exactly – Harvard Pilgrim apparently couldn’t handle the work on its own and needed outside expertise. But then it gets dicey.
This relationship [between Harvard Pilgrim and Perot Systems] includes some offshoring components. [Harvard Pilgrim Deputy CIO Bob] Trombly explains that healthcare insurance is a low-margin business; “a one percent annual fluctuation can make or break us. There is constant pressure from employers and regulators to reduce administrative costs. In our recent contract renegotiation, we challenged Perot Systems to help us aggressively reduce costs. One of the things they brought to the table was a proposal to reduce administrative costs by sending some of the work offshore.” …
Trombly is the first to admit he had “fears and misgivings” at the outset. But his view changed when he visited Perot Systems’s facilities in India. When he came home, he told his oldest son, who is heading to college this fall, “You better get off your butt because the rest of the world is ready to compete. It’s one thing to read The World is Flat; it’s another to see it in real time.”
He says “the staff in India is very well trained, doing great work, and eager to take on more. I think that’s a sobering lesson to everyone about the global marketplace.”
Charlie Baker sent Massachusetts jobs to India. There’s a campaign ad that writes itself.
You might wonder (I did, anyway) why the story of Baker outsourcing jobs to India and getting an award for it has not surfaced before now. After all, Baker has already been involved in a hard-fought statewide campaign in which his work at Harvard Pilgrim was a major topic of discussion. The answer might be as simple as this: Baker’s name does not appear in the “Outsourcing Center” story reporting the details. So if you (or a hypothetical opposition researcher) were spending all your time Googling “baker outsourcing” or the like, this story probably wouldn’t come up.
I agree about at least the optics of this.
At the same time, I suggest that we be careful about throwing stones. For better or worse, outsourcing IT jobs is part of bringing ANY enterprise-scale IT project to successful fruition. Outsourcing DOES save money.
Further, supporting a successful rollout is another area where outsourcing provides compelling cost advantages. If we are to include a Massachusetts-based support center in our IT planning, we must also be realistic about the costs of that decision.
The state has not demonstrated competence in its management of several major IT rollouts in the past few years. If we include a prohibition on outsourcing in the constraints on our state IT projects, it WILL both raise costs and increase the complexity of the task.
I’m dubious that ANY governor can both solve the state’s IT woes and prohibit outsourcing, especially without raising tax revenues to pay the increased costs that inevitably come with increased complexity.
A reality-based approach to governance requires, in my view, an equally realistic view of the tradeoffs that MUST be made in balancing cost, quality, and political considerations of each major IT project.
as I said in the post, there was “nothing wrong with” moving IT operations to Perot, “exactly.” Though oetkb raises an interesting question below: if a health insurer can’t handle claims processing or billing, then what, exactly, is it doing?
Anyway, the campaign issue is obviously the offshoring aspect. American jobs sent to India. More than just bad optics.
and that means India.
In addition to IT, BC/BS outsources all sort of business functions as well. If it’s like most companies, that means India or the Philippines.
As has been noted in other contexts, the board of MA BC/BS is composed of numerous Democratic luminaries, including labor leaders.
…have the homegrown talent to do this? Massachusetts Institute of Technology anyone?
But this is one of the great powers of outsourcing. Not only is the work done far away, it’s done by people the outsourcer never sees.
If you hire kids from MIT, you have to screen them, maybe test their skills, buy them computers, give them benefits. And then, if they screw up, written warnings in their personnel files, etc.
In India, I understand, salaries are coming up. The other outsourcing hotspots are less-developed. Those people can be fired in a heartbeat.
I’m not defending outsourcing. But when we discuss it we have to consider how powerful it is. It saves more than money.
Talent from MIT is significantly more expensive than offshore talent.
…was to resist the temptation to go cheap and create jobs here. At very least the tax structure should incentivise domestic jobs and disincentivise offshoring. The Commonwealth has a higher calling, I think, to hire local even if more expensive.
If our nominee were leading the charge to tax the wealthy, then this “higher calling” would be more meaningful.
We can’t afford the “higher calling” you seem to suggest without higher tax revenue.
We have a winner….
I was talking to someone last night that has 9 MsCS developers in India working the same hours he does in New York. All the developes are living very well in Mumbai and his total cost is less than the cost of one developer hired here.
While it may save money to outsource labor (though that might be debatable), should that always be the #1 goal? If it was technically possible, we could outsource all of our work in this country. Then what? We’d all be screwed, instead of merely some of us, because none of us would have jobs.
Our economy no longer works for everyone because we have outsourced the “simple” jobs – those which can be done by the lesser-skilled. So now what do we do with those people? They’re currently just sitting around, often causing problems, the proverbial “guy that I’m paying for with my taxes” (though most aren’t getting welfare).
In theory, outsourcing their jobs freed them up for more productive tasks – but we never delivered on just what those tasks should be. Those people still exist, and will continue to exist. They’re surplus capacity. You may not see many of them, but drive through some of the more poor communities and they become very evident. Don’t make the Republican mistake to assume that they’re just lazy – there is no place for them in our economy. You’re not going to train 95% of them to be biotech technicians or other high-skilled jobs.
Outsourcing is about trade, and we really can’t afford to run a trade deficit at the national, state, or even local levels. We need to be balanced, or even better, run a surplus.
Think of this trade like a family. If you have 10 family members, and 7 are employed, and all 10 want to be employed, and you need to have your house painted, and the three unemployed family members can paint houses, does it make sense to pay your money outside the family to have the fence painted, and also pay to support those 3 family members? Of course not. But that’s what we’re doing by outsourcing our labor to other countries. Of course, it’s not that simple because we don’t have a command economy, and these decisions are being made independently by many different actors, but until we look at the entire equation, we can’t say that we’re “saving money” at the state level by purchasing services from either outside the state or outside the country, because at the same time, we are providing services to people without jobs.
that the administrative costs of health insurance is too high. Are you guys advocating increasing the administrative costs of health insurance plans?
Medicare.
Charlie, while at HPHC had admin costs which kept on going up even with off-shoring jobs, can’t even bring costs down doing that. What the hell was he doing?
Dumping 128,000 patients in Rhode Island, laying off half HPHC’s employees, and raising premiums by double what BCBS was doing. Oh, yes, and tripling his salary.
It’s good to be the king.
You want hp to have failed because it would make single payer slightly less of a nonstarter? Elsewhere in the thread you guys nobly defend the workers whose jobs were outsourced.
The message seems a bit muddled, and maybe it just boils down to “Republicans wear tuxedos and clink wine glasses so vote for us”
I want to expound on this after thinking of it some more. Offshoring labor is a really bad thing for this country unless we account for it in our societal net.
Why is labor in other countries so cheap? Why can an Indian worker afford to work for $20k per year? Primarily because his cost of living is lower. But why is it lower? A few reasons. India does not have as many laws and regulation as the USA. Yes, those things increase the cost of doing business, but we generally find that it is good to not dump raw sewage into our rivers. India still does this. 80% of their sewage goes into rivers – so they aren’t paying the cost of treating their sewage.
By outsourcing to India (and China, and other countries), we are basically saying “we want to have a first-world, first-class country with lots of protections, but we want to screw our own workers to achieve this”.
The first wave of casualties were manufacturing jobs. We didn’t want pollution in our country, so we passed laws. We didn’t want child labor, so we passed laws. We didn’t want dangerous conditions, so we passed laws. We didn’t want 7-day, 16-hour weeks, so we passed laws. We allowed our labor to unionize so they had more leverage.
Those things cost money. So now we’re saying “but outsourcing is OK, because it saves us money”? Something has to give, and what gave is that the jobs left. We can’t compete with developing countries because they don’t have the laws we have driving up the costs. We have excised part of our workforce, put them out of work permanently. And now we’re doing the same thing for professional jobs. We’re working up the ladder because we are not competing only on brains and muscle – we are competing on laws.
If we want to compete with India and China, then we need to lower everyone’s salary here by 50 to 80%. Are you prepared for that? Your standard of living will need to drop to equalize with those developing countries. Our laws will need to relax too, so that means more sewage in our waters, more pollution in our air, more worker deaths.
The other alternative is that we create a massive welfare state, with vastly higher taxes which will go to support people who can no longer work in this country. At best, we can have them doing public works jobs. At worst, we can pay them to sit around.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Firing thousands of workers here so that everyone saves a little money is an untenable position if there is slack in our economy – and there is quite a bit of it. As we offshore things like accounting, that means fewer opportunities for accountants here. As we send more and more offshore, there is much less for the average US worker to do. The exceptional US worker will probably be just fine, but if you’re just average, there is no place for you, because there are millions of average workers in the world who can work for 50% to 80% less pay because they are not supporting the society we have here.
Most blue-collar workers realize this, most Tea-Party types do not like offshoring because they value the US economy, they value the US worker (plus, they’re often xenophobic).
I had gone through all the sources mentioned in the Globe article but never thought myself competent to discuss this, as I wasn’t living here at the time. As expected, there is some intelligent discussion here at BMG on the pros and cons of IT outsourcing–thanks to all who have commented.
My biggest problem with Baker here is his automatic assumption that because he presided over one IT project he can handle them all. I submit that what needs to be done with state IT is very different from moving overly complicated internal systems out to a vendor (the Harvard Pilgrim model). I invite you to peruse a recent report from the Senate Committee on Post Audit and Oversight (click on Documents, then choose Massachusetts Information Technology Report – S2107). This report rings much truer to me than anything Charlie Baker has said so far. The senators seems to grasp that the problem is not finding the cheapest vendors. It is decentralization (“turf wars”), a lack of internal resources to adequately vet and supervise contracts, reliance on a few large vendors who are often the only bidders, revolving doors between agency administrators and vendor sales staff, projects being too big so that more “agile” technologies can’t be employed, and so forth.
In order to have an information technology division that ultimately SAVES money, the next governor will have to REBUILD internally rather than just putting more out to bid. I think these Senators are kicking Charlie Baker’s butt when it comes to understanding this.
… this is not a failure particular to Charlie Baker, but to just about any living human (in my experience) who has ever presided over one IT project without ever actually having done, you know, IT work.. . So the attitude is ubiquitous among a certain “CEO” type. That still doesn’t excuse him. Rather it marks him as just another member of the herd and lays to rest any claim of ‘outside the box’ thinking.
Also, to be further fair, most of the really good IT people I know tend to be either rather aggressively libertarian and want nothing to do with government work (not just because of their anti-authority streak but also because governmental procurement processes are arcane and infuriatingly small-c conservative) or can demand the highest salaries, pricing themselves out of government work. So between the work, the cost of it and the people doing it, the squeeze is real. The next governor (hopefully) or some future governor is going to have make real leaps of faith in personnel and process to do the rebuild you describe as so absolutely necessary.
To the extent that healthcare (to bring myself back to the original topic) is on the radar of top tier IT talent I’m not sure the dynamic is all that different. (But I’ve not known a lot of people doing any kind of IT in healthcare so it’s speculation on my part to say, definitively if that part of the squeeze affects IT in healthcare). I do know that outsourcing, at the time Charlie Baker did it, was the path of least resistance further laying to rest any claim that Charlie Baker knows how to make tough decisions.
It’s called NextGen
It’s got the worst of both worlds.
1. Unable to agree on the business goals.
2. Technology boondoggle.
It’s been under development for decades. The rollout is troubled and will take years. The airlines are hesitant to invest in their part, probably rightfully so. Everyone involved in air traffic control will need retraining.
Oh, and if something fails, planes could crash.
… but that’s surprising. I’ve long considered the FAA foremost among governmental agencies in the application of risk assessment, failure analysis and the intersection of those things with decision making by humans under pressure. This has to be true otherwise we’d have planes falling out of the sky every other day (technically, a ‘landing’ is a controlled fall so we do, in fact, have planes falling out of the sky… but that’s not what’s meant here…) If the FAA can’t build it right, it can’t be built.
But that’s true, also, of our present system, is it not? (see previous paragraph, re: FAA and risk analysis, etc… )
This guy nearly single handedly shut down both airports for about two days.
… what you are saying. An attempted suicide with concommitant arson redounds to the FAA (if that’s what your asserting) exactly how?
The fire showed there was no redundancy in that part of the system.
The vision of the future is reasonable considering the expectation. For example, in the future there would be no way for a plane to disappear from radar. Real time data coming from the plane, to name a few simple ones.
There’s a number of sources on NextGen. Here’s the official FAA link
https://www.faa.gov/nextgen/
Vote middle class! Vote Republican!
I prefer Truman’s line – “If you want to live like a Republican, you had better vote Democratic!”
But ST is right, we need better messaging on outsourcing in general. In the private sector, it is no longer a debate, it is standard operating procedure. So something like this might motivate us, but it doesn’t really cost Charlie anything among his base.
We might want to talk more about the digital divide, for one thing.
He outsourced his bill paying, claim receipt departments, and premium collections. In other words the main functions of HP were farmed out. This is almost prima facie proof that if HP dissolved others could have picked up the slack. In-house operations with properly trained personnel(as they were purportedly in India) could have saved the day without going to the outside. It would have also been cheaper if it was under direct management. As a bonus it would have been more satisfactory to the public. Any company that does not have its act together to conduct business properly will fail. Better systems, not Charlie Baker’s company, saved the day. The favored treatment HP received as a receivership, and from Tom Reilley, the AG at the time, also preserved his behind. What would have happened if HP collapsed? Past history tells us that. HP absorbed a failing Pilgrim Health Care and everything went on its merry way until poor practices put the fused companies in jeopardy. This was also the story of Baystate Health Care when it was absorbed by BC/BS. The bottom line in these fixes, however, was none of them resulted in lower premiums, improved coverage, or a rational payment system to providers. That has continued, and was enhanced by Mr. Baker’s supposed success. Do we want this kind of approach to deal with the Baystate’s problems?
Not only, “As a bonus it would have been more satisfactory to the public.” I’m guessing that for a patient trying to reverse or understand a claims denial with a department in Massachusetts would also be more satisfactory.
And there’s the irony of Baker touting himself as being able to create jobs because he’s been a CEO.
Last, there’s not a single thing I hear from Baker that gives me the feeing that he cares about people.
That she actually doesn’t like children. I also heard from someone who used to work with her that might actually be true.
since she’s spent years of her career in an office specializing in child protection.
Most people that have them have at least one or two.
The person I know said that Coakley got all weird when women were discussing family stuff in the office.
nt
.
Why on earth would he bother being first a selectman (world’s worst job) and then running for state office two times if he didn’t care about people? Why not just show up for work each day and become richer?
n/t
It’s the other thing money can’t buy. (Though having money doesn’t hurt.)
to power. Even if he wins he is subservient to DeLeo. He’d be better off trying to make the jump from large to larger corporations.
Unless he really believes he can be President and believes this is the way, I don’t see it. I know him somewhat and he doesn’t give that (doesn’t care about people) vibe at all. You don’t have to believe me and you can think he lusts for power all you want. There’s no evidence of that.
I spent a lot of time with Scott Harshbarger in 1982 and he was a d*ck who cared about winning over everything. Projected it all the time.
A lot of elected officials don’t have children.
I tend not to vote for people without children, though it varies by position.
As someone with three who went a long time without them, I can say conclusively that people without children have no clue about what it is like to have them. No clue whatsoever.
I am tempted to reply that public policy is often separate from personal experience … but I feel like we are derailing the topic at hand.
and we’re just free-styling now.
…what you think the issues of this race are or should be, since you seem to think a candidate’s record isn’t an issue.
1. Should the government of MA expand or stay roughly the same.
2. Should MA business interests have their perceived needs (which they say would expand jobs) met, or are things fine as is, and really the workers need more help.
3. Could the state government be run better, freeing up money for other needs (including social services) or to be returned to cities/towns or people.
Baker slants slightly to one side of these issues, Coakley goes the other. I don’t see all the negatives that get dumped on Baker here, just a differnt view.
I think Baker has done a better job of summarizing what is wrong with the status quo, how he will change it, and how he is the person to do it.
Coakley, as Charley pointed out in April, has had a consistent inability to link her experience and tenure as AG, which is popular with voters, with what she plans to do as Governor. She also hasn’t criticized or distanced herself from Deval, and I would argue there is a silent groundswell against a lot of his leadership on the basis of DCF and the connector fail. Coakley should distance herself and capitalize on what she would do different than the incumbent as well as her opponents. Voters feel unsatisfied, and when they do, they go for the fresh face, even if its a Republican white male who outsourced jobs. We gotta do better.
who can’t have children. My wife had a hard time getting pregnant, and we spent some years without children, watching other people have them, and listening to other people talk about their children. Emotionally, it was very difficult.
I know nothing about Martha Coakley, but I can bear witness to the discomfort some people feel when they are unable to have kids which most people take for granted.
and when people want children but can’t have them, they adopt. I am concerned that a person who claims to be the the children/family champion doesn’t have one. I don’t think she can relate to my family’s needs.
Maybe this view is misguided, but no more misguided than all the random claims about Baker, which all originate from the R after his name rather than anything about him personally.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Very few infertile couples adopt. The market for adopting newborns is extremely tight and, even in the rare instance an infertile couple wants an older child, adoption agencies shy away from placing older children with families that don’t already have children and this for the benefit of both the child and the would-be parents.
The idea that, if you want a child, you just go and pluck one off the kiddy tree is ludicrous.
That’s a high bar. Or maybe you’re just high…
She was single until she was 52. Interesting. Her husband was also a lifelong single person.
I know folks who have adopted and been a godsend to their children. But people, no doubt, have their own reasons for not adopting. Criticizing someone for not having children is unfair. Criticize Coakley for her actions in the political arena and her career, even if the reasoning is specious.
Personally, I doubt that Baker’s outsourcing is much more than his doing his fiduciary duty for the company he was running. Was he supposed to run his company as if he would run for governor some day? I don’t think it says much about what kind of governor he’ll be. It’s just chatter. I don’t support him because he’s on the wrong team and is not likely to act as I’d like him to.
I need to rise above the general tone hear and not sink down to others’ level.
Especially during campaign season. Look back 6 or 8 weeks, and you’ll find people on the same team hammering each other with less.
Richard Tisei also claims to care about children and families and he also doesn’t have any. He also could’ve adopted with his husband, and has refused to do so. I have never seen you make this line of criticism against your candidate in that race, I suppose you are only doing it in this race because Coakley is a woman with a D next to her name.
The idea that Charlie Baker is anti-people is ridiculous and there’s at least as much, if not more evidence that Coakley doesn’t like children.
As far as Richard and his husband are concerned, I could make the theoretical argument that they are recently married and over 50 and not exactly prime candidates for adoption.
I could also say that a legislative position was different from an executive position.
But I will drop it because I think this thread is done.
…is whether a candidate has empathy for people who are different from him/her and will defend everyone’s rights equally. Differences will always exist and in one sense we cannot cross those divides — I will never know what it is truly like to be male or to be a parent or to be a person of color or a Muslim or an immigrant who does not speak the language. Someone who is 35 does not yet know what it is like to be 70. But we elect people ALL THE TIME who are different from us because we believe they have empathy for others and will fight for the rights of others to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It’s the last ditch effort of inferior candidates that they pull out the “I’m like you” card. Like all you need to know about them is that they have 4 kids. (Implication — they’re NORMAL and they somehow have a greater stake in the future.) This especially happens in local races. I’d much rather know how a candidate plans to vote on the issues I care about, what their qualifications and track record are, how well they work with others, whether I know where they stand, whether they will be beholden to people whose values are good or reprehensible, whether their own values align with mine, whether, as others have said on this thread, they want to use government to help people or to advance their own power or financial success. If you have two candidates who are equal in that regard, then yes, choose someone who you think will have more empathy for you or your issue. But other things generally aren’t equal. I am passionate about education and I vote to enhance public education every time. I don’t have kids and I’m not a teacher, but I believe that strong public schools are an important foundation of our democracy. And yes, I’m voting for Coakley.
That crystallizes the issue with Baker (for me at least). Does he want to be governor to save government from itself because he believes that he is the best “manager” out there? Or, does he want to be governor because he wants to use government to help people? I just don’t get the sense that Baker views government the way I do in it’s purest form—helping people who need help. If Baker has an interest in this, it doesn’t come across that way.
I was under the impression that we didn’t like non-government insurance carriers because the administrative costs were so high. So, now the local Democrats want high-administrative cost insurance carriers?
If everything about HP was so bad, then why did our government officials not allow it to implode? In any event, I have read on this site that HP was saved by a “government bailout” in its receivership. So, how much money, exactly, did the Commonwealth of Massachusetts spend “bailing out” HP?
no direct aid, but assistance of other kinds. Globe story from 2010.
hipeary
Turns out to be an insolvency mechanism generally available under state law.
… Available… to whom?
Boston Globe articles on 19 Feb 2000 and 14 Feb 2000 identified Perot Systems as a “potential investors in a ‘recapitalization’ plan” for Harvard Pilgrim. I don’t think this ever happened, but what was the payment schedule for the $700-million contract with HPHC? From all the publicity afterwards it seems like it would have been very much in Perot’s interest to extend credit to HPHC and in return, to get all of this free publicity for his outsourcing services. Remember at the time that Massachusetts was considered a tech powerhouse and other CEOs might notice that a Texas-based company had come in to “fix” things.
Ordinarily smart people suddenly pretend to be simpletons in order to pretend to give credence to silly conspiracy theories. It is like Bizzaro Fox and Friends.
Available to companies that provide insurance to residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
… it seems is a particular insolvency mechanism available under State Law to pay claims made against an insolvent insurer and has nothing whatsoever to do with the extraordinary step of placing an insurer into receivership. (Also, the entire healthcare regulatory and oversight systems were up-ended by RomneyCare and the individual mandate in 2006 and so I’m unclear as to why you are citing todays laws to justify actions taken in the year 2000).
Care to try again…?
In his ads, he says that he is a leader in job creation. He’s actually destroyed jobs in this state. This guy is really awful.
Possibly outsourcing was really good for Harvard-Pilgrim’s bottom line. I think the point to take from this is that being governor is very different from being CEO. It’s a rather different kind of management. Governors don’t get to outsource.
Possibly we can use this to blow a hole in the idea that business experience is somehow especially useful for political office.
Governors can outsource the state’s workforce. This is potentially a big issue. Someone should ask Charlie Baker about the MBTA Rail Car deal. Would he have pushed for the assembly to be done in Massachusetts – providing jobs for a number of years, possibly providing a base for doing research/development – or would he have allowed the cars to be made in China, so that the state pays less, but we have 300 more people on welfare and/or getting into trouble with the law?
The simple reality is that offshore labor IS significantly more affordable than the home-grown kind. Given this simple reality, the question then becomes do we want our governor to lie to us now (during the campaign), or later (when talk becomes reality).
The reality, today, is that our state is, by necessity, NOT FUNDING an array of vitally-important services because we don’t have the money. Children under the “care” of DCF are dying. Each DOLLAR that the state effectively spends by NOT outsourcing is another dollar that the state cannot spend on protecting those dying children.
The effective result is that a “no outsourcing” policy translates to taking money from dying children in order to pay comfortably prosperous MIT graduates (or factory workers in Western MA building MBTA equipment).
If Massachusetts voters want a “no outsourcing” labor policy, we must be willing to pay for it. Government costs money. Good government costs more money. It’s been decades since I’ve heard a nominee — from either party — acknowledge that truth.
If you’re going to advocate for outsourcing to save money and give it to the poor, then I would suggest that the state should not be a leader in any labor areas. We should eliminate pensions right off the top, including defined contribution plans (not all private companies pay those). We should get rid of unions. We should get rid of prevailing wage laws. We should cut vacation and sick time. Because every dollar we are spending on those things is one less dollar we can spend on the poor.
I do not believe that giving people subsistence money is the optimal solution. When people merely subsist, they do a lot of bad things. They may turn to crime and gangs out of boredom. They seem to have a lot of kids and at earlier ages. They often do not see a path to prosperity, so they can’t impart visions of success in their children.
Every company in this country is looking to ship their workforce to another country. See the problem? It’s a massive race to the bottom. It is not just some diabolical capitalist who is laughing while firing people so that he can buy yet another yacht. It is the small business owner who is trying to stay ahead of his competition. It is the even smaller business owner who buys his goods from China rather than from the supplier down the street.
I understand your point, that the money has to come from somewhere. I just don’t buy your argument that until we take good care of every poor person in the state, we should not be using our money to hire local people, and use it to hire foreign labor to save a few bucks. We need more balance.
Can we please separate observations of FACT from discussions about what we do in response to those facts?
Slate is among the very best roofing material in Massachusetts. When properly maintained, it lasts essentially forever (centuries, at least). It is also among the most expensive. For the first few centuries of our existence, public buildings in Massachusetts were constructed with slate roofs. We no longer do that, because of a shared consensus that our scarce building funds could be better used elsewhere.
We did NOT “eliminate pensions right off the top”, get rid of unions, get rid of prevailing wage laws, or cut vacation and sick time when we did that. On the contrary, we stopped spending money on slate roofs (and the relatively handful of skilled workers who installed them) in order to EXPAND that list of vital programs that each require funding.
A blind refusal to consider outsourcing will, at best, concentrate a significant part of already-scarce IT development funding in a handful of already-prosperous MIT graduates, dramatically slowing or eliminating a long list of OTHER vital IT projects that wait in the long and growing pipeline NOT being adequately served by today’s government.
What good does it do to offer unemployment programs if the unemployed can’t access them? What good does it do to offer benefits like those from Mass Save if those benefits can’t be distributed?
Surely we can and should look at least a millimeter or two below the surface of “local jobs” created by such a policy (or the similarly short-sighted claims about construction jobs “created” by casino construction) and ask whether we are getting the best “value” for our public spending — where “value” is measured by comparing expected results with our shared consensus of what we value.
I enthusiastically agree that we need more balance. It seems to me that in order to achieve that balance, we MUST have an objective discussion of the facts. It further seems to me that we must have a perhaps harder discussion about prioritizing our values, because it is our collective values that drive our decisions.
Indeed, the money has to come from somewhere. I did not make anything like the strawman argument you put forward. We do indeed need more balance.