Posted on 02/13/2004 6:11:03 AM PST by Deliberator
HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Under pressure from fellow Republicans, President Bush distanced himself on Thursday from one of his top economic advisers who said the outsourcing of U.S. jobs to workers overseas may benefit the economy.
"The (economic) numbers are good. But I don't worry about numbers, I worry about people," Bush told students and teachers at a high school in Pennsylvania -- a pivotal state in this year's election and one of the hardest hit by factory job losses during his presidency.
Without mentioning by name the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Gregory Mankiw, Bush said he was concerned "there are people looking for work because jobs have gone overseas" and vowed to "act to make sure there are more jobs at home" by keeping taxes low and by retraining displaced workers. Bush offered no new initiatives to curb outsourcing and aides said he opposed restrictions on free trade.
With political concern about unemployment heating up ahead of the November presidential election, critics have seized on Mankiw's characterization of "outsourcing" by U.S. companies as "something that we should realize is probably a plus for the economy in the long run."
Democrats said his comments and the council's annual report were evidence that the Bush White House is insensitive to the plight of out-of-work Americans.
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle predicted Mankiw would quit.
But Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York said, "This is the economic report of the president and not the economic report of Mr. Mankiw ... We cannot allow our Republican friends to shift the blame and the burden to Mr. Mankiw."
Senate Democrats said they would propose new protections for workers whose employers send their jobs overseas. Their proposal would require that outsourcing companies disclose their plans to their employees and to the Labor Department.
On Wednesday House Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois joined the bipartisan chorus of criticism from the U.S. Congress and the campaign trail, saying of Mankiw: "His theory fails a basic test of real economics."
The White House has rebuffed any suggestion that Mankiw resign. "That's kind of laughable," spokesman Scott McClellan said, adding: "Our economic team is doing a great job."
U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans defended the comments, telling CNBC: "What he praised was free trade and open trade. Every president since Herbert Hoover (1929-33) has said that free and open trade - as long as it's fair trade - is good for our economy."
At issue is the practice of a growing number of U.S. companies to move all or a portion of their operations to places like Mexico, India and China, where labor costs are lower and goods can be produced more cheaply, in order to improve corporate profits.
Nearly 2.8 million factory jobs have been lost since Bush took office and the issue looms large ahead of November's vote, where victory in rust-belt states like Pennsylvania could be key.
Underscoring its political importance to Bush's re-election, Thursday's visit was his 25th to Pennsylvania as president. He narrowly lost the state in the 2000 election, and analysts say he may have hurt his chances of winning it this year when he scrapped U.S. tariffs on steel imports in December to avert a trade war with Europe.
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
So gasp, we were on par with someone else, as though that were the creme de la creme of all griefs. I would not care if the whole world rose to the American standard of living. I get no jollies out of wagging my fingers at poor countries because they're poor.
Jou Nortes want too mauch for jour chit. We gonna take jour yobs and keeck jour butteses. Theen, we gonna start Aztlan...weethout jour "help."
Adios, suckers.
That's not the point at all. When I describe an "inefficiency" I'm talking about an "abnormal" situation in which an imbalance exists between supply and demand (for any number of reasons) that allows a business or individual to prosper for a period of time -- and by "prosper" I simply mean that they are able to get a "better than average" return on their input.
If the market consisted of me and you, and I made the things that you needed and vice versa that wouldn't be so.
For the market that you described, we are both right. If you grow lettuce and I bake bread, then there won't be any "inefficiency" in the market based on how I defined it. If we each eat a loaf of bread every week, and we both eat a head of lettuce every week, then you will grow 104 heads of lettuce every year and I will bake two loaves of bread every week. And half of your lettuce will be traded to me for half of my bread.
An "inefficiency" (actually, the term "imbalance" is probably more accurate) in this simple market could be something as simple as an eating binge on my part, in which I suddenly have a desire to eat both of my loaves of bread one week. Despite the fact that you did nothing to deserve it, you will suddenly find yourself with two heads of lettuce when you only have a need for one of them. There's no right or wrong here -- that's just the way it is.
There's nothing wrong with that, but then you'd better get used to a lower standard of living here in the U.S. The person who buys a $250 color television made in China isn't going to start paying $500 for it just because the cost has doubled -- he's going to pay $250 for a black & white model that is half as good as the one he was used to.
No, we were not. The average standard of living in this country lagged behind much of Europe up until World War II. Hey, how about that -- World War II started almost 30 years after the Federal government stopped "relying exclusively on tariffs for revenue" with the adoption of the income tax in 1913.
I do business on both sides of the border, and have lived on both sides of the border. "Alberta's Child" is the name of a song by Canadian country music legend Ian Tyson.
The utter irony of it all was that the worker on the Ford assembly line was able to buy a new car every few years, but only because his kids were slowly being saddled with a massive debt to pay off the cost of the Ford trucks that were dumped overboard.
Can you prove the dollar figures involved in this specific action added up to this, that they were the straw that made or broke the camel's back. Unions then as now were a mixed blessing, looking only for their own.
And neither did I. But even in our simple market there could be a basic "imbalance" that is the result of the natural order of things.
If you have a child one day, you're going to need more than one loaf of bread from me every week. And you're going to need more than one head of lettuce, too. That means you can either figure out a way to get the extra food you need, or accuse me of "greed" and "profiteering" when I demand an extra head of lettuce every week for the extra loaf of bread you need from me.
How would you go about getting the extra food (both the bread and the lettuce) that you need? To make this really challenging, add this consideration: Growing two heads of lettuce a week already requires you to operate at 100% efficiency for growing lettuce, so it's not quite as simple as "growing more" on your own.
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