W. PROMISES JOB GROWTH... for foreigners

[mburbank]

U.S. News
Bush economic report praises 'outsourcing' jobs

Tuesday, February 10, 2004
By Warren Vieth and Edwin Chen, Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- The movement of U.S. factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said yesterday.

The embrace of foreign "outsourcing," an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the U.S. economy.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

The report, which predicts that the nation will reverse a three-year employment slide by creating 2.6 million jobs in 2004, is part of a weeklong effort by the administration to highlight signs that the recovery is picking up speed. Bush's economic stewardship has become a central issue in the presidential campaign, and the White House is eager to demonstrate that his policies are producing results.

In his message to Congress yesterday, Bush said the economy "is strong and getting stronger," thanks in part to his tax cuts and other economic programs. He said the nation had survived a stock market meltdown, recession, terrorist attacks, corporate scandals and war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was finally beginning to enjoy "a mounting prosperity that will reach every corner of America."

The president repeated that message during an afternoon "conversation" on the economy at SRC Automotive, an engine-rebuilding plant in Springfield, Mo., where he lashed out at lawmakers who oppose making his tax cuts permanent.

"When they say, 'We're going to repeal Bush's tax cuts,' that means they're going to raise your taxes, and that's wrong. And that's bad economics," he said.

Democrats who want Bush's job were quick to challenge his claims.

Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, supports a rollback of Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans and backs the creation of tax incentives for companies that keep jobs in the United States -- although he supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, which many union members say is responsible for the migration of U.S. jobs, particularly in the auto industry, to Mexico.

Campaigning yesterday in Roanoke, Va., Kerry questioned the credibility of the administration's job-creation forecast. "I've got a feeling this report was prepared by the same people who brought us the intelligence on Iraq," he said. "I don't think we need a new report about jobs in America. I think we need a new president who's going to create jobs in America and put Americans back to work."

In an evening appearance at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., North Carolina Sen. John Edwards mocked the Bush administration's economic report.

Edwards, also a Democratic presidential nomination candidate who also supports repealing tax cuts for the richest Americans and offering incentives to corporations that create new jobs in the United States, said it would come as a "news bulletin" to the American people that the economy is improving and the outsourcing of jobs overseas is good for America.

"These people," he said of the Bush administration, "what planet do they live on? They are so out of touch."

The president's 411-page report contains a detailed diagnosis of the forces contributing to the U.S. economic slowdown and a wide-ranging defense of the policies Bush has pursued to combat it.

It asserts that the last recession actually began in late 2000, before the president took office, instead of March 2001, as certified by the official recession-dating panel of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The report repeats the administration's contention that the Bush tax cuts must be made permanent to have their full beneficial effect on the economy.

Social Security also must be restructured to let workers put part of their retirement funds in private accounts, the report argues. Doing so could add nearly $5 trillion to the national debt by 2036, the president's advisers note, but the additional borrowing would be repaid 20 years later, and the program's long-term health would be more secure.