Add Alan Greenspan to the list of "clueless morons" that just doesn't understand the evils of outsourcing: <G>
story.news.yahoo.com
Greenspan: Employment Will Begin to Grow
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve (news - web sites) Chairman Alan Greenspan (news - web sites) said Thursday that "employment will begin to increase more quickly before long," and that erecting protective trade barriers was not the answer to the nation's current worries about the loss of jobs to foreign competition.
Wading into an election-year issue, Greenspan told a House committee that current anxiety in America over the loss of U.S. jobs to low-wage countries was understandable, given the weak job growth the country has experienced since the 2001 recession and the two years of a jobless recovery since that time.
However, he said the nation had reason to be more optimistic that job growth will rebound in coming months.
"As our economy exhibits increasing signals of recovery, jobs loss continues to diminish," he said in testimony to the House Education and Workforce Committee. "In all likelihood, employment will begin to increase more quickly before long."
Since President Bush (news - web sites) took office in January 2001, the country has lost 2.2 million jobs.
Greenspan said that the extended period of job losses has heightened fears that U.S. workers are losing out to foreign competition and spurred a number of proposals to erect protectionist trade barriers.
Greenspan did not name those who are pushing such trade barriers, but Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites), the expected Democratic presidential candidate, has attacked the Bush administration's free-trade policies and promised to review all trade proposals to make sure they contain protections for American workers.
Greenspan said a "new round of protectionist steps" represented "alleged cures" which he said "would make matters worse rather than better."
Instead, Greenspan said the country needed to explore avenues to make sure that all Americans had the opportunity to get a good education and then be able to return to school to improve their job skills.
Greenspan said that support for community colleges has been an area where government investment in education has paid off. He said community colleges were likely to provide critical support to boosting job skills in the future as more and more workers see the need to upgrade their skills over their careers.
He also suggested there was a need to upgrade teaching in American high schools, citing a 1995 study by Boston College that showed American students scored higher than students in other countries in math and science in the fourth grade but by the 12th grade had test scores well below international averages.
"Many of our students languish at too low a level of skill and the result is an apparent excess of supply relative to a declining demand" for workers with low skill levels, he said.
Greenspan said it was understandable that Americans felt a heightened job insecurity given the loss of 2 million jobs and that even in the current recovery, job growth has been weak — reflecting the fact that companies are boosting productivity to increase output rather than rehiring laid-off workers.
But Greenspan said the answer to these job stresses was not to resort to raising trade barriers to keep foreign goods out of the country because this would remove the pressure for U.S. companies to become more competitive and push America's standard of living lower.
"Time and again through our history, we have discovered that attempting merely to preserve the comfortable features of the present, rather than reaching for new levels of prosperity, is a sure path to stagnation," Greenspan said. |
