Outsourcing. Bad.

More jobs were lost in the U.S. because of offshoring manufacturing than because of the housing bust or the financial meltdown, the Economic Populist concludes.

Here are the numbers:

• Finance-related jobs (finance, insurance, real estate) fell by 767,000 jobs since the peak of the housing bubble in December 2006.
•  Construction, which has been killed by the housing bust, lost 2.1 million jobs from its height in July 2006.
• More than 2 million manufacturing jobs lost since the start of the Great Recession and 5.6 million manufacturing jobs since 2000.

By comparison, there are 920,000 people in China making iPhones, iPads and iPods. (Apple has 46,000 employees around the world.)

Guess who else is getting screwed by outsourcing? Information workers -- IT and software programming jobs. The U.S. has lost a million of those since peak employment in March 2001. Economic Populist points out that a lot of information jobs are displaced by H1B visas, so he puts the actual loss of U.S. information jobs at 1.7 million.

It's a great post. Read the whole thing here.