Outsourcing, offshoring … whatever you call it, shipping American jobs overseas is big news. It’s a juicy campaign issue that has Democrats salivating and Republicans bleating, “Hey, what’s the big deal?”

Since offshoring could never happen to ME, I can take a dispassionate, ivory tower view of it all. After analyzing it for half an hour or so, I’ve found some aspects of the subject that haven’t been talked about.

First, we need to think more about our children. Some jobs are more likely to be offshored than others, and we need to steer our children toward safe occupations they can do only here in the United States.

Any work that involves shuffling paper can easily be done in India or China. So Junior and Sis should be nudged toward work that requires physical presence, such as making funnel cakes or doing nails.

For years, offshoring involved jobs such as making clothes and small appliances. This was tough on American textile and factory workers, but if those folks had done the sensible thing and gone to Ivy League colleges, they wouldn’t have been so vulnerable.

The reason everyone’s worked up about offshoring now is that it’s no longer clear where this could end. If a quasi-white-collar job such as working in a call center can go to India, what’s next? Computer programming?

Oh, right … that’s happening already.

It’s worrisome, but we shouldn’t have a knee-jerk reaction. Offshoring, as President Bush’s economic adviser famously said, can be good. Once you start thinking outside the box, all sorts of attractive possibilities come to mind.

How about lawyers? Most of them work in offices writing long, boring briefs. Why couldn’t some smart, educated Indian do that? We could get legal services for $20 a day instead of $200 an hour.

The trial-lawyer jobs could go overseas, too. Thanks to the dot-com bubble, the oceans are criss-crossed with more fiber-optic cable than we know what to do with. We could use it for video conferencing all sorts of things we currently do face-to-face. Most of us do our trial viewing on the small screen already.

A lot of medical jobs could go to other countries. Maybe not emergency surgery, yet. But nonhands-on jobs like psychoanalysis could be done via video, no problem. And all those doctors who sit around reading test results and ordering medication — their work could be done from abroad, too. All we’d need here would be inexpensive nurses to draw samples and run them through the machines.

Think of the savings. We could solve the health insurance and Medicare crises overnight.

How about education?

Most of the higher-education establishment could be shipped overseas, too. Professors could give their lectures on video monitors. Heck, at some big universities they’ve been doing that for years.

Come to think of it, we could ship the student body abroad as well. After all, what would be the point of having Indian professors teach American students to do jobs that are going to be taken over by Indians anyway?

Offshoring is so appealing that some of us might volunteer for it. I’d happily see my job shifted to some low-cost Caribbean island where it would pay half as much, so long as they’d ship me there to do it.

Corporate CEOs take note

If you work in a big company, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of people you work with are never there. Some are bosses whose offices are always dark. Presumably, they’re doing something useful somewhere, like meeting with bean-counters or buttering up their own bosses.

If they’re not needed to run things day-to-day, send those jobs to Calcutta.

When’s the last time you actually laid eyes on the top executives who run your company? Never? In lots of cases, they work in headquarters that are thousands of miles away. Couldn’t memos saying “cut costs” or “raise profit margins” be sent just as easily from New Delhi as New York?

Sure they could. There are millions of talented, educated, hard-working Indians just chafing for a chance to run big American corporations.

And they wouldn’t demand all those stock options, corporate jets and country club memberships that Americans do. Offshoring management could save companies fortunes. That would stoke profits and make stock prices skyrocket.

After offshoring has fully flowered, those of us still working in America won’t make much money walking each other’s dogs and giving massages. But we’ll make up for it with fat investment returns.

When the upper classes have been sent packing, America will be a workers’ paradise.