Outsourcing hurts American workers: the solution to losing U.S. jobs overseas is to change the trade rules.

• Author: Gussert, Andrew

You know a problem is serious when people start making up new words to try to define it. "Offshoring" used to be something you'd do for vacation, now it'll put you on a permanent vacation. Along with its cousin, "outsourcing," they are the two new political buzzwords in Washington, D.C. Is there a real solution to the problem of losing our jobs overseas?

It doesn't make sense to focus our anger at the Chinese worker: You can't blame somebody for wanting a better job. We shouldn't blame business leaders, as it's a rational and often necessary choice under our current system of subsidies and trade laws. These people take advantage of outsourcing for the simplest of reasons: Because they can.

If we want to stop the offshoring of American jobs, we need to change the current system of trade laws and agreements that are structured to encourage outsourcing and offshoring.

Ben Franklin said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. An intelligent response to outsourcing would be to stop passing the same trade agreements over and over.

Across America, we've lost more than 3 million jobs since the introduction of NAFTA 10 years ago. States like Wisconsin were hit particularly hard: From March 2001 to January 2004, it lost over 74,000 manufacturing jobs, a decline of 14 percent in its manufacturing base.

These factory workers are often retrained in Internet technology or software design, only to find those are the new and next wave of jobs being exported and offshored. By the end of 2005, it is projected that more than 830,000 American tech jobs will have moved to low wage countries like India and China. The cycle has become an economic revolving door of outsourcing, with each new sector taking on additional casualties.

Once thought to affect only industrial sectors, outsourcing now threatens computer engineers, IT specialists, call-center workers, paralegals, technical writers, accountants, tax professionals and public service workers. Put simply, if your job uses a phone, a computer or a welding torch, outsourcing trade policies may hurt you. If you can telecommute, your job can likely be outsourced.

There is an intelligent response. Stop the insanity. It's time to change the way we negotiate trade agreements, instead of repeating our mistakes, or we will continue to get the same results.

At the state level, we can promote state contracts that purchase American goods and services, and eliminate...