Obama Solution to Stop Outsourcing: Stop Counting Jobs Outsourced (No, Seriously!)

[Omaha Steve]

X post by request. I did a DU search and it didn't find the post in the Labor Forum. Don't know why. But sorry if this is a dupe here.

http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2010030903/obama-solution-stop-outsourcing-stop-counting-jobs-outsourced-no-seriously

By Mike Elk

March 3, 2010 - 2:17pm ET

The numbers are outrageous, sickening even. How can anyone stand to look at them?

Since 2000, the U.S. has lost 5.5 million manufacturing jobs, with 2.1 million of those jobs being lost in the last two years alone. Since 2001, over 42,400 factories have closed in the U.S., and another 90,000 are considered at severe risk of closing. The last time so few were employed in manufacturing was in 1941, before World War II spending pulled that sector out of its Great Depression slump.

Numbers like these make me want to cry.

So President Obama has come up with a big and bold solution to deal with the problem. He's going to shut down the federal office that counts how many jobs are being shipped overseas.

It’s like ignoring a bully that picks on you in grade school. If we just ignore companies like Whirlpool that take stimulus money and ship jobs overseas—maybe they will stop doing it.

That will show those big multinational companies. Hit them where it really hurts—in their egos.

Seriously, folks, this is what President Obama is really proposing. From The Washington Post:

Like a scorekeeper for the world, a tiny unit within the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks globalization's winners and losers, and the results are not always pretty for the United States. Manufacturing jobs here, for example, have fallen faster since 1979 than in Canada, Germany or Japan. Compensation for those jobs dropped here in 2008 but jumped in South Korea and Australia.

Soon, however, Americans may be spared the demoralization in these numbers: The White House wants to shutter the unit that produces them.

President Obama's budget would eliminate the International Labor Comparisons office and transfer its 16 economists to expand the bureau's work tracking inflation and occupational trends.

FULL story at link.

[Donnachaidh]

1. a similar thread was posted yesterday Steve - in GD

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7833988

It probably got un-recced to death, of course. :shrug:

[ixion]

2. Ah, yet another example of Obama adopting the BushCo rules of governing

if there's a statistic you don't like, don't count it.

If it becomes a real problem, discontinue the whole report!

As evidence, I offer BushCo's decision to stop publishing the M3, so we wouldn't know how f'ked up the money supply has become.

[Biker13]

3. K&R

nt

[AllentownJake]

4. The audacity of Orwell nt