The Bush Administration is losing credibility on every possible issue by the hour. This hour's travesty... ________________ In the New Economics: Fast-Food Factories? By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON, NYTimes Is cooking a hamburger patty and inserting the meat, lettuce and ketchup inside a bun a manufacturing job, like assembling automobiles? That question is posed in the new Economic Report of the President, a thick annual compendium of observations and statistics on the health of the United States economy. The latest edition, sent to Congress last week, questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should be reclassified as manufacturers. No answers were offered. In a speech to Washington economists Tuesday, N. Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisers, said that properly classifying such workers was "an important consideration" in setting economic policy. Counting jobs at McDonald's, Burger King and other fast-food enterprises alongside those at industrial companies like General Motors and Eastman Kodak might seem like a stretch, akin to classifying ketchup in school lunches as a vegetable, as was briefly the case in a 1981 federal regulatory proposal. But the presidential report points out that the current system for classifying jobs "is not straightforward." The White House drew a box around the section so it would stand out among the 417 pages of statistics. "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, for example, is it providing a 'service' or is it combining inputs to 'manufacture' a product?" the report asks. "Sometimes, seemingly subtle differences can determine whether an industry is classified as manufacturing. For example, mixing water and concentrate to produce soft drinks is classified as manufacturing. However, if that activity is performed at a snack bar, it is considered a service." The report notes that the Census Bureau's North American Industry Classification System defines manufacturing as covering enterprises "engaged in the mechanical, physical or chemical transformation of materials, substances or components into new products." Classifications matter, the report says, because among other things, they can affect which businesses receive tax relief. "Suppose it was decided to offer tax relief to manufacturing firms," the report said. "Because the manufacturing category is not well defined, firms would have an incentive to characterize themselves as in manufacturing. Administering the tax relief could be difficult, and the tax relief may not extend to the firms for which it was enacted." David Huether, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers, said he had heard that some economists wanted to count hamburger flipping as manufacturing, which he noted would produce statistics showing more jobs in what has been a declining sector of the economy. "The question is: If you heat the hamburger up are you chemically transforming it?" Mr. Huether said. His answer? No. ____________ This maladministration is grasping at any straw to say the job situation is improving. How long till we hear that the tax cuts are responsible for the big uptick in manufacturing jobs? How many more gifts are the Bushies going to give the Dems? This story alone is worth a few points in WV, OH, MI, IL, IN, and WI.
But Subway calls their condiments line a "sandwich assembly line"...that counts right? Oh wait, the people who work there are called "Sandwich Artists"... maybe they can get funding under the National Endowment for the Arts.
So, they are casting about for ways to show that employment in manufacturing is up? Flipping burgers?? This is just pathetic. (glad you're back around, rimrocker! )
I predict that this will be another thread that the Bushies won't try and defend on this board. Nomar was the lone dissenter on the Science thread, and he didn't actually refute any argument. Could it be that we have another unanimous opinion about this kind of spin?
This whole administration reminds me of the National Honor Society kids in high school who were only on the list because they were clever enough to cheat well. If they had put the same kind of energy into studying that they put into cheating, they may have gotten there on the merits. In this maladministration, if they actually spent time and effort looking at how to create jobs instead of spending so much time and effort trying to redefine failure into success, we'd all be better off.
This is the 2nd time Mankiw was grossly misquoted, and had his statements taken way out of context. The first was when everybody and their mother was up in arms when he said that "outsourcing is good for America". You had Lou Dobbs saying Mankiw should be fired for supporting sending jobs off to India, yada yada yada, Republicans and Democrats up in arms; the whole gambit. If you read the report where that line came from, he wasn't talking about outsourcing to foreign countries. He was talking about outsourcing in general (like having a company like Paychex handle payroll, etc.). Here, in this "hamburger example" he was posing a HYPOTHETICAL. He wasn't saying that McDonald's workers should be counted as manufacturing employees. He was just making an observation about how the state of manufacturing has changed in this country (something all of us would agree with). So once again, we have people that completely distort and misrepresent the facts for their own political agenda - the very essence of demagoguery. NEXT
It's easy to win arguments when you change the facts. Where is the version of outsourcing where Mankiw says he means outsourcing to US companies? In defending the quote most people are referring to, Mankiw himself mentions outsourcing to *foreign* countries: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,111715,00.html Last week, some of the comments I made about the benefits of international trade were far from clear and were misinterpreted," Mankiw told the National Economists Club (search). He said that any lost job "is an awful experience" for the workers involved and for their families. He said the Bush administration understood that and was pushing programs that emphasize retraining of workers who lost their jobs due to global competition. Mankiw said the administration was focused on creating those new jobs, but the administration believed the best way to create them was not through erecting protectionist barriers but through promotion of open markets and free trade Mankiw made only passing reference to the portion of the president's economic report released last week that drew the most fire. In the section on trade, the report noted the new trend to offshore outsourcing of service jobs such as by establishing call centers in India to handle customer service calls from America I see no place where that the President's panel theoretical question is not represented as a theoretical question. The fact that he had the cojones to think this was worthy of consideration is the point.
