Feb. 11—With some 15 million U.S. workers unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to continue hunting for work, the Bush administration now is backing moves to outsource more U.S. jobs.
“Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), when releasing the CEA’s annual economic report to Congress. “More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that’s a good thing.”
Bush Job Creation Claim Far off the Mark
In the Feb. 9 report, the CEA predicts the economy will generate 3.9 million new jobs this year—a claim that would mean an average 325,000 new jobs each month. Last spring, the CEA said the president’s “Jobs and Growth” millionaire tax cut plan would create 306,000 jobs monthly starting in July. Yet today, the Bush administration is more than 1.8 million jobs short of that prediction.
“This administration has been projecting that jobs are around the corner for the last three years,” says Economic Policy Institute (EPI) President Lawrence Mishel. “Now it’s claiming that the economy will be able to generate 325,000 jobs a month, which would be more than the total number of jobs created during the entire last half of 2003, which was the worst year for job growth in many years.”
Bush Policies Have Failed to Create Jobs
In fact, the economy has lost a net 2.9 million private-sector jobs and 2.8 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office. Meanwhile, the number of long-term jobless workers has been roughly 2 million for months, and for much of that time, long-term unemployment has been at its highest rate since 1983.
“Bush is behaving like a gambler on a losing streak—it’s double or nothing, with all the chips on the same losing squares,” says economist and University of Texas public policy professor James Galbraith.
Working families keep paying the price for that bad bet. “The economy is too weak to support job growth of 3.9 million this year, and the prediction is cynical considering the almost 15 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work,” says Center for Economic and Policy Research economist and co-director Dean Baker.
“The federal government had the chance to create good jobs by investing in the states, which desperately need work on run-down infrastructure such as schools and bridges—but it blew that money on millionaire tax cuts. To propose to do that infrastructure work now, we’d be looking at deficits of up to $800 billion.”
AFL-CIO President John J. Sweeney says the Bush administration’s support of outsourcing U.S. jobs “is not only completely insensitive to the pain that millions of unemployed workers and their families are suffering, it is also just plain dangerous for our nation’s future.
“The Bush administration’s fiscal year 2005 budget proposes to slash dislocated worker and job training funds funding by almost $1 billion since 2001. These cuts not only harm American workers, they put our competitiveness at risk.”
The report highlights the administration’s economic priorities: “It’s a hands-off policy that believes dog-eat-dog capitalism works best for everybody,” Mishel says. “But you need an economy that works for people, not the other way around.”
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