Another trend that is gathering momentum is the growing number of US expats. As I travel abroad I find more and more former US citizens who have emigrated. These are people of means. They are leaving and taking their talent and money with them. It's kind of an insider knowledge thing. The rest of us will understand later why all these people bailed out. m
No More Excuses on Jobs By PAUL KRUGMAN Published: March 12, 2004 As job growth continues to elude the U.S. economy, we're hearing two main excuses from the Bush administration and its supporters: that the real situation is much better than you're hearing, and that to the extent employment is lagging, it's the result of factors outside the administration's control. But after three years of extravagant promises and dismal results, the time for excuses has passed. Let's start with the real job situation. A number of readers have asked me about what Marc Racicot, who heads the Bush re-election effort, told Don Imus the other day. He claimed that those miserable job numbers are misleading, and that another survey presents both a more accurate and a much happier story. You can find the same claim all over the right-wing media. But it just isn't so. It's true that there are two employment surveys, which have been diverging lately. The establishment survey, which asks businesses how many workers they employ, says that 2.4 million jobs have vanished in the last three years. The household survey, which asks individuals whether they have jobs, says that employment has actually risen by 450,000. The administration's supporters, understandably, prefer the second number. But the experts disagree. According to Alan Greenspan: "I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate. Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow." You may have heard that the establishment survey doesn't count jobs created by new businesses; not so. The bureau knows what it's doing â conservative commentators are raising objections only because they don't like the facts. And even the less reliable household survey paints a bleak picture of an economy in which jobs have lagged far behind population growth. The fraction of adults who say they are employed fell steeply between early 2001 and the summer of 2003, and has stagnated since then. But wait â hasn't the unemployment rate fallen since last summer? Yes, but that's entirely the result of people dropping out of the labor force. Even if you're out of work, you're not counted as unemployed unless you're actively looking for a job. We don't know why so many people have stopped looking for jobs, but it probably has something to do with the fact that jobs are so hard to find: 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks, a 20-year record. In any case, the administration should feel grateful that so many people have dropped out. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent. In short, things aren't as bad as they seem; they're worse. But should we blame the Bush administration? Yes â because it refuses to learn from experience. Franklin Roosevelt, in his efforts to combat economic woes, was famously willing to try anything until he found something that worked. George Bush, by contrast, seems determined to try the same thing, over and over again. In 2001 the administration rammed through long-term tax cuts, heavily tilted toward the affluent. But employment didn't turn around, and by late 2002 many economists â including supporters of the original tax cut â were urging it to try something different. My own piece, "My Economic Plan," was fairly typical: I called for extended unemployment benefits, temporary aid to state and local governments, and rebates for low- and middle-income workers. Maybe this more or less textbook response to a depressed economy wouldn't have worked. But we'll never know, because the administration rejected all such proposals. Instead, it went for a clone of the 2001 tax cut â another big break mainly for those at the top. And once again this failed to deliver the promised jobs. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has mortgaged the nation's future. If all of his tax cuts are made permanent, they'll reduce revenue by at least three times the amount that would be needed to secure Social Security benefits at current levels for the next 75 years. No sensible person blames Mr. Bush for the onset of the recession in 2001. But he does deserve blame for the fact that all he has to show for three years of supposed job-creation policies is a mountain of debt.
The jobs crisis and the GOP Pat Buchanon -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: March 10, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc. President Bush and his advisers are puzzled and worried. Economic liftoff took place right on schedule in July when the tax cuts took effect. In the last six months of 2003, the economy blazed along on a growth path of 6 percent. But where are the jobs? Last week's jobs report, with hundreds of thousands giving up the search for work, and manufacturing jobs disappearing for the 43rd straight month, jolted the White House. What is going on? They're calling it a jobless recovery. Wrong. Millions of jobs are being created. They're just not being created here in the United States. The reasons can be traced to these four acronyms: NAFTA, GATT, WTO, PNTR. These are the trade treaties and global institutions that have permitted the historic substitution of foreign labor for American labor, to the enrichment of the transnational companies that look upon the Congress as a wholly owned subsidiary. Numbers do not lie. In 2003, America exported $1 trillion in goods and services. Almost 10 percent of GDP. Excellent. By the Clinton-Bush I rule â $1 billion in exports creates 20,000 jobs â that $1 trillion worth of exports created 20 million jobs. Exports are good for America. The problem? We imported $1.5 trillion in goods and services. That created or supported 30 million jobs abroad. But even this understates the case. For foreign workers can be hired at a fraction of the cost of a U.S. worker. Our $1.5 trillion in imports is probably supporting 150,000,000 jobs abroad. The U.S. trade deficit is the greatest foreign aid and wealth transfer program in history, and our workers are paying for it by the loss to their families of the American Dream. Consider China. With some $150 billion in imports from China last year, we supported 3 million jobs there. But as China's wages are a tenth of U.S. wages, or less, we are probably talking about 30 million or 40 million jobs in China that are tied to exports to the United States. For the Bush Republicans, the chickens are coming home to roost. As Robert Novak reports, North Carolina welcomed Sen. John Edwards home after his unsuccessful campaign as a hero. Why? At the end, Edwards was a fiery adversary of the Bush-Clinton trade deals, a denunciator of NAFTA, a champion of workers. Indeed, just as almost all the Democrats ended up the campaign sounding like Howard Dean on Iraq, on trade they had all begun to sound like Dennis Kucinich. North Carolina may now be in play in November, says Novak. If so, and Bush loses the Tarheel State, he loses the presidency. At a weekend conference on immigration and jobs hosted by The American Cause, which this writer chairs, one speaker blurted out that while he voted for Bush in 2000, he would never do so again. The room erupted in applause, though virtually all there were conservatives, and all had once been Goldwater-Nixon-Reagan Republicans. The crisis of the Bush dynasty is that, like the Bourbons of France, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. They do not understand that we have entered a new world where the old ways no longer work. They yet recite the old litanies that lost their relevance in the Reagan decade. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and India abandoned state socialism, and China threw open its doors, a billion workers were thrown onto a global job market to compete against Americans who earn 10 and 20 times their wages. The trade deals the U.S. government then negotiated, at the behest of U.S. corporations, were not really trade deals at all, but enabling acts. U.S. corporations were told: You can now shut your U.S. factories, shed your U.S. workers, build your new plants in Mexico, China and India, and bring your finished goods back to the United States, free of charge. Go for it! As Paul Craig Roberts writes, what is happening is not "free trade" in the Adam Smith sense where Portugal makes wine and Britain makes textiles and ships. What is happening is the mass transfer of the "factors of production" from First World countries to Third World countries. What is happening in the world is what happened in America after World War II, when factories moved to the Sun Belt in search of non-union labor that would work as hard for half of what the high-paid workers in the industrial heartland demanded and got. Asia is the new Sun Belt, and America is fated to be the "Rust Belt" of the world, as China becomes the factory floor of the global economy and India, through outsourcing, its back office. Republican free-trade dogma inhibits action to protect U.S. jobs. The GOP is hogtied and hamstrung by its ideology in dealing with the crisis. Its only response is to mutter with Dr. Pangloss that it is all for the best. The GOP is fortunate its opponent in 2004 is John F. Kerry, who is as clueless as they are on the new world economy that has been designed, and is operating, to loot America of her patrimony.
Outsourcing could create 'wage compression' for IT workers An ITAA study says outsourcing is good for the economy -- but not necessarily for IT workers http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/outsourcing/story/0,10801,91787,00.html?nas=AM-91787