An economic whopper
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
©2004 San Francisco Chronicle
IT APPEARS that some of President Bush's economic advisers have decided that the best way to put a happy face on a jobless recovery is to sprinkle old jobs with new titles. That way, a person who flips burgers can be counted as a product manufacturer, putting him or her in the same job classification as autoworkers.
Unfortunately for the administration, this concept hit a speed bump last week, when some members of Congress questioned the idea of recasting fast-food workers as assembly-line spatula operators. "When a fast-food restaurant sells a hamburger, is it providing a service or is it combining inputs to manufacture a product?'' asks the annual Economic Report of the President. Only when special sauce is counted as a durable product, suggested Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., whose state has 163,000 unemployed factory workers. He also asked whether Greg Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, would like fries with his new manufacturing jobs.
The cheesy attempt by the administration to mask statistics on lost manufacturing jobs is hardly surprising, given that the White House recently announced it would create 2.6 million jobs this year, only to quickly disown the claim. But it is never going to satisfy a job-hungry public that doesn't yet consider napkin restocking as a high-growth career.