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Pastimes : Rarely is the question asked: "is our children learning" -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SalemsHex who wrote (2096)	2/19/2004 12:40:48 PM
From: SalemsHex	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2171

Forecast on jobs played down By Peronet Despeignes, USA TODAY WASHINGTON — The White House backed away Wednesday from its prediction that the economy will add 2.6 million new jobs this year, inviting more criticism of President Bush from Democrats. Administration officials didn't explicitly disown the forecast, which was laid out in the annual "Economic Report of the President" last week, but they wouldn't endorse it. "The president is interested in actual jobs being created rather than economic modeling," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan at a briefing Wednesday. "We're interested in reality." Asked repeatedly why he wasn't standing behind the numbers, McClellan said: "The president stands behind (his) policies. That's what's important." He described the forecast as the work of "number crunchers" and said the president isn't a statistician. The report is written by the president's Council of Economic Advisers. John Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, derided the administration's "far-fetched promises" of more jobs. "We need a president with a real plan for jobs," he said. Kerry's attack highlights the tough spot President Bush is in this election year. More than 2.2 million jobs have been lost on his watch, the worst jobs record of any president since Herbert Hoover, who was in office during the catastrophic job losses at the beginning of the Great Depression. Leading indicators of hiring — including corporate profits, business confidence surveys and the stock market — have all been pointing up. And White House economists say their prediction for 2% growth in jobs is well grounded in history — about what the U.S. economy has enjoyed, on average, coming out of previous job slumps. But the administration faces a very real possibility its forecasts will prove overly optimistic for a third straight year. Many economists have been stumped by the job market's stubborn weakness. Like most analysts, White House economists were counting on much stronger job growth this year. The U.S. economy added 112,000 jobs in January, well short of what most analysts expected and well below the average of 216,000 a month it would take to meet the forecast this year. Caught in a slump that has persisted longer than the "jobless recovery" that wrecked the re-election bid of his father in the early 1990s, Bush is walking a fine line, trying to show confidence in the recovery without seeming out of touch or indifferent to the plight of the unemployed and anxious. "I think the economy's growing, and I think it's going to get stronger," Bush said Wednesday. "But I'm mindful there are still people looking for work, and we've got to continue building on the progress we've made so far." A big question is whether this really is a new economy with a new job market. New technologies have allowed many companies to do more with fewer workers, and the Internet has made it easier to transfer even white-collar work overseas. Surging health care costs have made U.S. workers more expensive to employ, and relentless global competition has sent companies looking for cheaper labor abroad. "Many Americans remain in denial on the degree to which the global labor markets are changing," says Donald Straszheim, a former chief economist for Merrill Lynch and head of Straszheim Global Advisors. "We need to fully accept the realities of global competition: Corporate survival demands a profitability focus, cost control and outsourcing." usatoday.com