Unbelievable:

This is the head and sub-head of today's Los Angeles Times story:

Bush Supports Shift of Jobs Overseas
The loss of work to other countries, while painful in the short term, will enrich the economy eventually, his report to Congress says

Excerpt: (emphasis added)

The movement of American factory jobs and white-collar work to other countries is part of a positive transformation that will enrich the U.S. economy over time, even if it causes short-term pain and dislocation, the Bush administration said Monday.

The embrace of foreign outsourcing, an accelerating trend that has contributed to U.S. job losses in recent years and has become an issue in the 2004 elections, is contained in the president's annual report to Congress on the health of the economy.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisors, which prepared the report. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

and

The report devotes an entire chapter to an issue that has become increasingly troublesome for the administration: the loss of 2.8 million manufacturing jobs since Bush took office, and critics' claims that his trade policies are partly to blame.

His advisors acknowledge that international trade and foreign outsourcing have contributed to the job slump. But the report argues that technological progress and rising productivity — the ability to produce more goods with fewer workers — have played a bigger role than the flight of production to China and other low-wage countries.

Although trade expansion inevitably hurts some domestic workers, the benefits eventually will outweigh the costs as Americans are able to buy cheaper goods and services and as new jobs are created in growing sectors of the economy, the report said.

The president's report endorses the relatively new phenomenon of outsourcing high-end, white-collar work to India and other countries, a trend that has stirred concern within such affected occupations as computer programming and medical diagnostics.

"Maybe we will outsource a few radiologists," Mankiw told reporters. "What does that mean? Well, maybe the next generation of doctors will train fewer radiologists and will train more general practitioners or surgeons…. Maybe we've learned that we don't have a comparative advantage in radiologists."

This story should be reprinted by the Democratic National Committee and distributed to everybody in the nation.

OBSERVATIONS: It's one thing to try to fight job movement or even be indifferent to it. But to support it? Amazing.

So much for getting a good education (e.g. becoming a radiologist).

If this doesn't cause Bush to lose the election, nothing will.

posted by Quiddity at 2/10/2004 10:18:00 AM