Jason's Rationale for Voting for President Bush: Economy (part 1)

During Clinton’s first term in office, unemployment averaged six percent while under Bush it has averaged 5.5 percent. Currently the unemployment rate is 5.4%, a historic low. It is one of the lowest in the world. Canada’s joblessness is at 9.4%, Italy 8.6%, Germany 9.9%. 140 million Americans have jobs, which is another record. Our GDP, the gross domestic product, has averaged 3.4% growth in the 10 quarters after 2001, but in the last 4 quarters, ever since the tax cuts, the GDP has shot up to 4.8% growth! 3.4% is around the average growth since WWII. Not only that, personal income is growing by 5%, and accounting for inflation, it comes to a 2.6% growth. Total compensation, which includes wages, salaries, non-cash and non-taxable benefits, such as health care, has grown at 3.9%. These statistics show that we ARE growing, not sinking. I’m optimistic because in a growing economy, there’s a higher windfall from a bigger tax base than in an economy with less growth.


Reason for me to be optimistic and for Europeans to be pessimistic? Their GDP is growing at less than 2%, and unemployment is around 10%! France, Italy, and Germany have lower GDPs than all except five states! It just adds insult to injury when I learn that while America was in its recession, the GDP was at around 2%, higher than that of Europe? In fact, an European economic report says that number “represents almost boom conditions in Germany, for example.”


The report says a lot. In a nut-shell, it says that it is better being poor in a rich country than a poor one. Good economic development leads to fewer low-income households. Good economic development leads to higher wages, which lead to higher incomes. It cites problems associated with high taxes, and that “high tax wedges give the wrong incentives.” It adds that “equalization policy and a large public sector also have their problems.” Not only that, they said that Europeans work at their leisure, while the Americans work on the job.

I would say that the Europeans are attributing several reasons why their economy is lagging, while America’s is growing. These reasons are: high taxes, no sense of obligation or pride in their work, too big government/bureaucracy, and the inability to pay good wages. Because America generally believes in the opposite, no wonder we see our economy doing much better than theirs. It disturbs me when people want America to become socialist, it would mean the downfall of our economy. And those leftist-socialists cry foul whenever the economy is going south. Like it is commonly said, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

Jobs and outsourcing? Does outsourcing really destroy America, as Kerry loves to emphasize on the stump? According to a study by Bruce Bartlett, a senior fellow at the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, "How Outsourcing Creates Jobs for Americans," over the past 15 years, foreign corporations have moved jobs to the United States at a faster rate than jobs have left. "Jobs insourced to the United States increased from 4.9 million in 1991 to 6.4 million in 2001," reports Bartlett. There's been an 82 percent increase in insourced jobs compared to a 23 percent increase in outsourced jobs. He also adds that insourced jobs pay about 16.5 percent more than the average domestic job, and one-third of them are in the manufacturing sector.

There are two axioms that many Republicans like to repeat: Give a person a fish and you give the person a meal; teach the person to fish and you give a livelihood. And: No one washes a rental car. It means that people actually DO behave most responsibly with stuff they own. That is why Bush has a menu of incentives for private retirement, health, education and savings accounts.


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