By Vincent Safuto staff writer
January 21, 2003
Over the past couple of years, we've seen the economy implode, one job at a time. There's so much cutting back that the federal government announced recently that it's not even going to track mass layoffs anymore, though it says it's a measure of the economy.
No matter how you slice it, our economy's in a bad way, and our economic future is cloudy.
President Bush's $647 billion plan to shock the economy back on track certainly got the attention of a lot of people, and there's going to be plenty of debate and horse-trading in Congress before we see any benefits. But we have to face the reality that the president, his plan notwithstanding, can't fix America's economy and create jobs; only American business can. And American business's solution right now is not to create more jobs in America but to move them overseas.
The president says he wants businesses to create jobs, and he's willing to give them enormous tax breaks to do so. But every day companies announce that they're closing U.S. plants and either opening production facilities in Mexico, China or some other country, or subcontracting jobs to providers in other countries.
Of course, Bush didn't invent using the tax system to persuade companies to keep production within the 50 states, just as he isn't the only president, governor, mayor or county commissioner to try and fail to keep a company from leaving. Some companies take their tax break or incentive and then split anyway.
And it's not just the blue-collar workers who will soon lose their livelihoods. According to a story in the Boston Globe Dec. 25, "Employers will move 3.3 million white-collar service jobs and $136 billion in wages overseas in the next 15 years as they seek lower costs, increased production and higher profits."
So, all that time, money and effort expended by unemployed Americans to learn to make computers work well (most of the time) and get them to talk to each other and play nice may be ultimately futile: Those jobs are going bye-bye, too. Companies have decided that in India, where a well-educated population speaks English and has the same computer skills as Americans, they can get a tech-support person or programmer for peanuts compared to U.S. wages.
What's frustrating is that even if we were to go out and buy stuff like mad to help the U.S. economy and our fellow citizens, it only holds off the destruction of our economy and social fabric.
I wish President Bush would see this, and get mad. If he'd direct his anger at what's being done to America toward those business leaders who got him elected and now plan to abandon their country's economic future, he might go down in history as the man who reversed the terrible decline of America as an economic force.
If the president cares about the American people and the judgment of history, let alone 2004, he'd better get to work now.
Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com)
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