Posted on 02/11/2004 7:09:27 PM PST by maui_hawaii
WASHINGTON (AP)--House Speaker Dennis Hastert took a swipe Wednesday at one of President Bush's chief economic aides for describing the shipping of American jobs abroad as ``just a new way of doing international trade.''
The unusual attack by Hastert, R-Ill., on an administration official of his own party underscored the sensitivity the issue of jobs has acquired in the early stages of this year's presidential and congressional elections.
Hastert used a four-paragraph written statement to criticize Gregory Mankiw, the chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. Mankiw made his remarks Monday in a briefing as the White House released its annual report on the economy.
``I understand that Mr. Mankiw is a brilliant economic theorist, but his theory fails a basic test of real economics. An economy suffers when jobs disappear,'' Hastert said.
The economy has lost 2.2 million payroll jobs since January 2001, giving Bush the worst job creation record of any president since Herbert Hoover.
``Outsourcing can be a problem for American workers and for the American economy,'' Hastert said, employing a term used to describe the shipping of jobs elsewhere. ``We can't have a healthy economy unless we have more jobs here in America.''
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Mankiw's job was not in jeopardy, and dismissed the criticism of the adviser's remarks.
``The president is strongly committed to creating jobs here at home. I think that's reflected in the actions we have taken and the actions we're calling on Congress to take in addition to that,'' McClellan said. ``Any job loss is regrettable.''
The White House, Hastert and other Republicans say they have been fighting to restore jobs by cutting taxes for businesses.
Mankiw's comments drew fire, more predictably, from Democrats as well.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., introduced a nonbinding resolution saying Bush's policies ``have either failed to address or exacerbated the loss of manufacturing jobs'' in the United States.
The resolution said the Senate should oppose efforts to send American jobs overseas, and approve tax incentives to discourage U.S. manufacturers from doing so.
``We need to create jobs in this country, not China, Bermuda or anywhere else,'' said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa.
Mankiw called the movement of U.S. service jobs ``the latest manifestation of the gains from trade that economists have talked about'' for a long time.
``Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,'' he said. ``More things are tradable than were tradable in the past and that's a good thing.''
Bush's report on the economy had a similar passage.
``When a good or service is produced at lower cost in another country, it makes sense to import it rather than to produce it domestically,'' it read. ``This allows the United States to devote its resources to more productive purposes.''
Bush's report predicted that 2.6 million U.S. jobs would be created this year.
Private economists have said that to achieve that, the economy would have to perform at extremely strong levels and end a trend in which job creation has been weak. Many of them expect job growth this year of about half the administration's estimate.
Late in the day Wednesday, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao issued a statement highlighting a department study predicting where new jobs will be created over the next 10 years and saying the administration was committed to helping to provide the training workers will need for these new jobs.
``Nine of the top 10 fastest-growing occupations will be in the health care or technology fields,'' Chao said. ``This underscores the importance of the president's initiatives to provide billions of dollars of education and training to workers to access the education and skills necessary to fill these jobs.''
The Labor Department study predicted that most of the future job growth will be in the service sector. Jobs at stores, hotels and restaurants are expected to grow faster than average. Industries including health care, information and transportation also will grow quickly.
Construction is the only goods-producing sector in which employment is projected to rise, with continued declines occurring in manufacturing.
Oh, joy. An opportunity to be a Wal-Mart greeter may yet open up!
The bad news is that the technology jobs will be in India.
All that means is that we are going to have socialized medicine, and they will need more people to run the beauracracy, so, the government will be hiring...soon...
Sounds like yet another partisan hack who comes up with anything at all to defend his position to me.
This topic is beaten like a dead horse. I have refuted statements like Mr. Boortz 50 times already.
Its going to come out in the ballot box. No more arguing.
Or he'd buy a piece of computer software made in Albania instead of its competing American equivalent if the American company couldn't outsource jobs to India, right?
So he's a radio show host and he's not a partisan hack? He should stick to radio.
Sounds like he's the same thing, but on the other end, of a hollywood movie star.
Unless he's done international business, I say he should stick to things he's qualified to talk about.
From the web site:
I wasn't through with higher education after Texas A&M. I entered law school in Atlanta in 1973 and graduated in 1977. Law school finally presented a challenge worthy of my attention, so I worked at it and graduated near the top of my class. I passed the bar before graduation so I went into practice immediately. I continued practicing law until I signed a contract with WSB in 1992.
During my years in talk radio I have managed to find other things to do. We'll attribute this to the fact that I am easily bored. From 1977 to 1992, as I said, I practiced law in addition to doing the talk show. Prior to 1977 you could find me working as a jewelry or carpet buyer, an insurance salesman, selling life and casualty insurance, loading trucks, slinging mail at the post office, working in an employment office, writing speeches for the Governor of Georgia and auditing the books overnight at a sleazy motel. Since I didn't retire from my law practice until I signed with WSB in 1992 this would mean that I was 47 years old before I ever had less than two jobs
He sounds like a hard worker, but still unqualified to make a judgement.
Hillary has also been busy selling out the U.S.
Firm will look to UB for research projects that may have a commercial use
Buffalo's bioinformatics center signed up a new corporate partner Monday, one with capital and business ties that will help transform lab research into job-generating products, officials said. Tata Consultancy Services, an infotech giant based in Mumbai, India, signed a research sharing partnership with UB in a ceremony Monday. It also announced the opening of a regional office in downtown Buffalo.
"TCS is an international powerhouse in the area of consulting and information technology," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton said at the ceremony at the Hyatt. "I think this will lead to more jobs and investment here in Buffalo."
Sen. Clinton introduced the company to upstate New York in a tour last summer.
The high-powered announcement also drew Subramaniam Ramadorai, TCS' chief executive officer; Nobel laureate Herbert Hauptman, of the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute, and Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello.
But local competitors fear TCS could end up exporting computer tasks to India, where wages for programmers are lower.
If Bush wants to create 2.3 million jobs tomorrow, all he has to do is have the military kick out 2.3 million illegal immigrant workers.
To what purposes? To provide assistance to the unemployed/underemplyed? How those resouces end up in the US coffers, taxed from the extra profits of outsourcers or from the remaining workers?
It sure as hell would be if I were president.
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