Like a Cloud, Economic Woes Follow Bus Tour

CRAWFORD, Tex. - President Bush slipped speedily into vacation mode this past weekend at his furnace of a ranch in Central Texas, where he spent Sunday fishing, clearing cedar and going for a walk with the first lady and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. But before the president ducked out of public sight, he made sure to address one of the biggest re-election anxieties of Karl Rove, his chief political adviser: the nation's continuing loss of jobs and the uncertainty about the economy.

"This week, three members of my cabinet — Treasury Secretary John Snow, Commerce Secretary Don Evans and Labor Secretary Elaine Chao — visited business owners and their workers in the Midwest," Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address on Saturday. "They received reports that the economy is picking up."

Anyone on the trip, which was a very un-Air Force One-like, two-day, six-city bus journey across Wisconsin and Minnesota (Ms. Chao dined on Tuesday night at Burger King), could see that the cabinet members charged with promoting the president's tax cuts also heard a lot of anger from workers about foreign competition and laid-off relatives and friends.

"Right now I am very disillusioned with the Republicans' policies," said Michael Retzer, a Republican and a consultant to a supplier for Harley-Davidson. Mr. Retzer told Mr. Snow at a Harley plant near Milwaukee that he did not see how the tax cuts would stimulate the economy when so many consumers would spend the extra money on goods made overseas.

Later, in the kind of confrontation with a disgruntled citizen almost never seen on the president's trips, Mr. Snow tangled with an unemployed software programmer at the drive-through at Culver's Frozen Custard and ButterBurgers in Wausau, Wis.

"He said, `But your tax cuts haven't done anything for me,' " Mr. Snow recounted the next day to reporters, as the bus traveled through Minnesota. "And I said, `Well, now, let's just take a second and talk about that.' "

Here in McLennan County, Tex. — which includes the nearby city of Waco, the one-stoplight town of Crawford and the president's 1,600-acre ranch — the number of people unable to find work jumped to more than 6,000 in June 2003 from more than 4,000 in June 2000, according to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics.

"That's pretty much a general slowdown that mirrors the rest of the country," said Cheryl Abbot, an economist at the agency's Southwest Regional Office in Dallas.

Although the McLennan County unemployment rate jumped from 4 percent in June 2000 to 5.7 percent in June 2003, it was still lower than the national unemployment rate in June of 6.4 percent. But the jobless rate for Texas that month was 7.5 percent, and more than 800,000 people in the state could not find work, up from 527,000 people in June 2000.

An unscientific series of interviews with Crawford businesspeople and churchgoers Sunday revealed plenty of support for Mr. Bush, whose presidency has brought a surge of tourists to the once-shuttered main street but uneasiness about the economy and nervousness about his policies.

"You look at the tax breaks he's cut for everybody and I wonder how he's able to do that," said John Dutschmann, 32, a sales manager for a concrete products company who had just attended services at Crawford's First Baptist Church. Mr. Dutschmann, a Democrat who supported Mr. Bush in 2000, said he was still behind the president, although he had trepidations about the economy. "We just put our trust in him, and we hope he knows what he's doing," he said.

Paul Stripling, 67, a Republican and executive director emeritus of the Waco Baptist Association, who had also attended services at the First Baptist Church, said that Waco had not felt the economic crunch as much as other parts of Texas and that Mr. Bush "is doing the best he can with a very precarious situation."

Brent Duncan, 40, a hotel owner who was talking with other parishioners after services at Crawford's United Methodist Church, said that his business was doing well — he is building a hotel in the nearby town of McGregor — and that he would probably vote for Mr. Bush in 2004. But Mr. Duncan, who described himself as a conservative Democrat, said that his support was not guaranteed.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Mr. Bush has little on his public schedule this week, although Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is to make an appearance Friday.

But next week, as part of a monthlong campaign to try to convince voters that sunnier economic days are just around the corner, Mr. Bush will meet at the ranch with his economic team, then take his economic message around the country in day trips from Crawford. His tone will be upbeat, which was evidently the tenor of the report he heard from his cabinet secretaries after the Midwest bus trip last week.

As Mr. Snow put it, "I'm going to go back and tell the president, `Mr. President, I ran into a lot of people who asked me personally to express my gratitude to you for worrying and thinking about us.' "

Mr. Snow did not say if he would mention the man in the drive-through at Culver's.

why waste money and capital on something when it can be more efficiently used elsewhere?

They can't make it more efficiently. They can make it cheaper.

There are two problems here. Pick a column:

Part of the problem is what we have done to ourselves with environmental regulations and labor regulations.

Foreign producers don't have the cost of our environmental restrictions and our labor protections. As a result, not only are they making things cheaper, but they are using more resources, creating more pollution and killing and injuring more workers in the process.

Don't misunderstand me. I think we have really gone beyond the point of reasonableness and into seriously diminishing returns with our restrictions and standards. However, the rest of the world is spewing polution, exploiting their young children, getting workers killed and injured, and generally doing things we prohibit and strongly punish here.

If it's wrong to pollute the air or poison a river in the U.S, it should be equally wrong to poison a river or pollute the air in China or India. If it's wrong to pay workers $0.05 per shirt piece work rates in the USA, it should be wrong to buy a shirt made with $0.05 per shirt piece work labor in the Dominican Republic.

In short, we need to tell the environmentalist that have put our manufacturers out of busines, "If it's bad for Americans to pollute, it's just as bad for Chinese and Indians to pollute, and you, the 'environmentalists' will have to pay the increased cost of goods produced in factories that meet your restrictions. We won't allow you to flout those regulations by buying goods made by polluters abroad." The only reason the useful idiots in the environmental movement push their crap is because they don't actually have to pay the price for it. Well, American workers should be fed up with paying the price of a clean environment close to home with their jobs when foreign workers can keep working and destroying the planet, or at least their part of it.

In short, access to our markets should be based on compliance with our standards. We should probably lower our standards to a more reasonable level. Once we have things at a reasonable level, only allow goods from sources that meet those reasonable standards. Bar those countries who are unreasonably exploiting their people and their environment from selling their goods in U.S. stores.

Also, it would help if US companies would realize that if they fire all the Americans and move all the jobs to India and China, they won't have any customers in the USA to buy their products any more. That's bad for business in the long run, even if you do save a few bucks in the short term.

The other part of the problem is the long term outlook for taxation, regulation and government costs (and possibly government stability if the situation gets really bad). While the meager tax cuts do provide some stimulus in the short term, the long term outlook is very bleak. Bush's attempt to make Republicans more socialist than the average DemocRAT has hurt this even more.

Businesses make long term investments in job creating assets like plants and equipment based on their long term view of the economy. Ours looks bad in the long term.

I think the Bush tax cuts still expire in 2010 (or is it 2011?). There's tax increases looming on the horizon for Medicare prescriptions (which will cost $ trillions), and for retiring baby boomers collecting Social Security.

Add to this the fact that Republicans are spending like drunken sailors on discretionary, welfare state social programs. I'm not talking about spending on homeland security and defense (which was a necessary expenditure). I'm talking about spending on the Department of Education (up 65%-70%), the Department of Labor (up 65-70%), on the farm bill ($100 billion) and on prescriptions for Medicare ($400 billion, honest ;) really).

In spite of what the Bushbots say about the deficit projections being unimportant, deficits do matter, especially in job creating long term investing. What's most important is the trend for the deficits. That trend appears to be ever increasing. There's every indication from the Republicans that if economic growth actually does increase revenues, the Republicans will spend those increased revenues on welfare state expansion, trying to outspend the Democrats to win reelection.

With that environment, the long term picture for interest rates is bad. The long term picture for taxes is bad. The long term picture for excessive regulation is bad. There's nothing good in the long term outlook to make people want to invest in job creation in the USA. Especially when they can outsource their production and now their operation, information technology and accounting jobs to less regulated, more pro-business environments abroad.

Two things are needed for this economy to really boom in the USA.

First, we need fair trade, not the totally open anarchist "free trade" that we have now.

Second, we need some signs of fiscal restraint from Washington DC. Preferrably from the Republicans.

Those two items would go a long way toward making the big boom that looks like it will happen "any time now" actually start happening in the USA. Otherwise, that boom is likely to happen (if it ever does) abroad, and we'll still have severe unemployment and a soft economy in the USA.

The tax cuts alone aren't going to lift this economy. We continue to lose American jobs every month. Somehow consumers are continuing to spend money, but that can't go on forever if the job losses continue. Also, there's a negative trend for consumers that almost everyone is ignoring. The increases in consumption over the last couple of years has been fueled significantly by people refinancing their mortgages and pulling cash out to spend on other goods. With interest rates now headed up, that source of consumer purchasing power has quickly stopped.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.