I’ve heard rumors that the Bush White House is run by political geniuses who consistently stay one step ahead, but sometimes I’m a little skeptical.
To put this story in context, remember that Bush has the worst record on job creation of any president since the Great Depression. With this in mind, it didn’t make a lot of sense — at least, politically — for the Bush White House to endorse moving American factory jobs and white-collar work overseas, but that’s exactly what has happened.
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 U.S. economy.
“Outsourcing is just a new way of doing international trade,” said 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.”
[…]
The report endorses the relatively new phenomenon of outsourcing high-end white-collar work to India and other countries, a trend that has created concern within affected professions such as computer programming and medical diagnostics.
And before you think that Greg Mankiw is just some White House staffer who’s opinion does not reflect Bush’s beliefs, note that CNN reported, “[T]his is not just one aide to the president. The president signed this document and it’s a very strong statement supporting outsourcing.”
Even Republicans didn’t think much of the White House announcement. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), one of Bush’s biggest congressional champions, condemned the White House’s position, saying its “theory fails a basic test of real economics. An economy suffers when jobs disappear.” Another House Republican even called on the president to fire Mankiw as a way to distance Bush from the administration’s support for outsourcing.
It’s as if the White House is helping craft the Democratic campaign ads for us. Imagine commercials in Ohio (20 electoral votes), Pennsylvania (21 electoral votes), and Michigan (17 electoral votes) in which we remind voters that Bush, who has overseen the loss of over 2 million jobs since taking office, believes the shipment of U.S. jobs overseas is a “good thing.”
For more on the Bush administration’s policies on job flight, the Center for American Progress has a very helpful fact sheet.