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Bush's economic chief: Outsourcing U.S. jobs is 'probably a plus'

Date Posted: March 5 2004

Perhaps the defining issue in this year’s presidential election is our nation’s loss of manufacturing and other good-paying jobs that have taken place since the Bush Administration has been in office.

The nation has lost 2.2-2.4 million jobs since 2000, and Bush is almost certain to be the first president since the Great Depression to have a net loss of American jobs on his watch. During this election year, we expected him to “try a little tenderness” toward U.S. workers, but the hits just keep on coming.

On the heels of going out of his way to pass regulations substituting compensatory time off in place of overtime payments for eight million U.S. workers, Bush’s Labor Department this year issued suggestions on how employers can get around paying workers overtime. Now, a top Bush advisor has publicly suggested that outsourcing U.S. jobs to overseas companies is “probably a plus” for the nation’s economy.

Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, said in a White House briefing on Bush’s 2004 Economic Report that job outsourcing “is a growing phenomenon, but it’s something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run.”

Leading Democrats pounced on Mankiw’s comments. “Nearly every state in the nation has lost manufacturing jobs, and, contrary to the administration’s economic theories, there is nothing good about it,” said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle.

Added Sen. Edward Kennedy, (D-Mass.), “The president’s economic report is an insult to every hard-working American. It’s unpatriotic economics, and he should apologize for it.”

Even Tom Donohue, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president and CEO, told CNN Mankiw’s comments were “a pretty stupid delivery of a message in a political year.”

Even in his statement “clarifying” his comments, Mankiw said the goal of U.S. economic policy should be “not to deny change but to help workers prepare for the global economy of the future.”

“The irony in Mankiw’s misstep,” reported CBS News, “is that it came in the very same politically savvy report to Congress, the Economic Report of the President, in which he predicted the U.S. economy in 2004 would create an astonishingly optimistic number of jobs, 2.6 million, that would more than erase the estimated 2.2 million jobs that have been lost during the Bush administration’s first three years.”
Daschle called the report “Alice in Wonderland economics.”