Bill Clinton is right: John Kerry should get off the topic of Vietnam and onto the topic of the economy. BuzzCharts would suggest that he bring some much-needed data analysis to the discussion of dreaded outsourcing.
So far, that discussion has gone like this for Kerry & Co.: Even though the economy is growing, it’s growing only for the rich. The middle class is having more and more trouble making ends meet, what with Benedict Arnold CEOs “outsourcing” jobs to India and household incomes falling further and further behind inflation.
But can Kerry back any of this up? Of course not. That’s why the more he talks about the economy the more holes are going to show up in his rhetoric.
BuzzCharts has dealt with much of this before: Jobs are up once you count self-employment (which is real employment); incomes are way up once you count all sources of income; and jobs lost by outsourcing to foreign shores are infinitesimally small once you compare them to current levels of job growth.
To give you a better sense of this last point we offer the following: Even according to the Labor Department’s payroll survey, which is a Bush critic’s favorite metric, the U.S. has created 1.4 million jobs so far this year. This works out to about 6,000 new jobs per day. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign outsourcing erased about 4,200 jobs in the first quarter of this year. In other words: Three months of foreign outsourcing was erased by less than one day of domestic job growth.
For a little more perspective, let’s compare the number of U.S. jobs lost overseas to the current number of jobs in America: At the rate of 4,200 jobs per quarter, assuming that none of these jobs are replaced (although BuzzCharts points to the calculation above, which shows that they are overwhelmingly being replaced), America will lose all of its jobs in a little more than … 7,000 years.
Call it John Kerry’s 7,000 year itch.
– Jerry Bowyer is the author of The Bush Boom and an economic advisor to Blue Vase Capital Management. He can be reached through www.BowyerMedia.com.