Bush Administration Backs Moving More U.S. Jobs Overseas

Meanwhile, millions of U.S. workers are looking for jobs.

While 15 million U.S. workers are unemployed, underemployed or too discouraged to continue hunting for work, the Bush administration has embraced sending more jobs out of the country.

"Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade," said N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of Bush's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), when releasing the annual Economic Report of the President Feb. 9. "More things are tradable than were tradable in the past. And that's a good thing."

Since President Bush took office, the country has lost a net 2.9 million private-sector jobs, including 2.8 million manufacturing jobs. The number of long-term jobless workers has remained roughly 2 million for months, and for much of that time long-term unemployment has been at its highest rate since 1983.

In the face of these bleak figures, the Economic Report of the President predicts the economy will generate 3.9 million new jobs this year, or an average of 325,000 new jobs each month. Last spring, the CEA said the president's millionaire tax cuts would create 306,000 jobs monthly starting in July. Yet today, the Bush administration is more than 1.8 million jobs short of that prediction.

"This administration has been projecting that jobs are around the corner for the last three years," says Economic Policy Institute (EPI) President Lawrence Mishel. "Now it's claiming that the economy will be able to generate 325,000 jobs a month, which would be more than the total number of jobs created during the entire last half of 2003, which was the worst year for job growth in many years."

"Bush is behaving like a gambler on a losing streak-it's double or nothing, with all the chips on the same losing squares," says economist and University of Texas public policy Professor James Galbraith.

Working families keep paying the price for that bad bet. "The economy is too weak to support job growth of 3.9 million this year, and the prediction is cynical considering the almost 15 million Americans who are unemployed, underemployed or who have given up looking for work," says Center for Economic and Policy Research economist and co-director Dean Baker.