Kevin Collins: New approach needed as jobs vanish

It's that time of year again: We students are looking for summer employment. Some may not need to work, instead finding interesting but unpaid internships. Some will be at Daddy's firm. But if you're like me, you've been looking for work the old fashioned way: many resum‚s, many phone calls and a whole lot of aspirin.

We're not alone. Since 2001, the economy has lost 2.4 million jobs, and while the Bush administration is still saying that recovery is just around the corner, they've been saying that for about as long as we've been losing jobs.

However, reality consistently fails to live up to their overly optimistic predictions. Last month, the economy created only 21,000 jobs, far short of the 125,000 that President Bush had promised. Moreover, those jobs were overwhelmingly created by state and local governments, with nearly no new jobs created by private businesses.

With November drawing ever closer, President Bush and his friends would like to obscure the new economic reality. In addition to overestimating job growth, listen to Fox News long enough and you'll hear that (a) unemployment, at 5.6 percent, is holding stable at a three-year low; and (b) there's another employment survey of households that says there has been a moderate increase in jobs. Make no mistake: These numbers are used only to deceive.

In reality, unemployment is only that low because workers -- 392,000 last month alone -- have become so frustrated by the Bush recession that they've stopped actively looking for work and are therefore no longer counted in the labor market. Moreover, even Alan Greenspan has admitted that the household employment survey is unreliable, endorsing instead the survey of payrolls that is the source of the statistics cited above. The truth hasn't stopped the Bush administration from using misleading and politically favorable data, but this strategy should hardly surprise us anymore.

But at least we know why the aspirin bottle is running so low.

The administration's "job growth" policy has been to cut taxes, cut taxes and (surprise) cut more taxes, overwhelmingly benefiting the wealthiest among us on the specious logic that this would spur private sector job growth. Simultaneously, Republicans have been hurting workers, both in the short term by refusing to extend unemployment benefits and in the long term by raiding Social Security to pay for more tax cuts. What funds have been given for job retraining are being used by the administration as a political tool, as they grace electoral swing states with more dollars. Message: out with the compassionately conservative, in with the politically crass.

And finally, to add insult to injury, Bush's chief economic adviser wants to reclassify fast food jobs as manufacturing work, again, just in time for November. While this is pure Enron economics, it means that you actually have a better chance at getting a manufacturing job this summer than your father does.

Bush's policy has been a fiasco, and this is not just a question of social justice; it's one of common sense. If a strategy fails this miserably in an area as important as American employment, the response should not be to continue down the wrong path but to stop and change direction. The question, then, is why continue failed policies (Bush wants to make current tax cuts permanent) when others, now most prominently John Kerry, are offering alternatives?

The answer lies in John Edwards' argument that there are two Americas, one for the rich and one for the rest of us. President Bush only knows one of them, and this breach in perspective is far more relevant and profound than even the administration's growing credibility gap.

Let's be honest. John Kerry and George Bush come from the same background. Both come from old, New England money. Both attended elite prep schools and continued on to Yale, where both joined the Ivy League's most exclusive secret society.

Yet while John Kerry was sweating and bleeding alongside ordinary enlisted men in Vietnam, George Bush's father got him into an Air National Guard unit so stacked with sons of privilege that it was known as the "Champagne Unit." And while John Kerry has served the public as a prosecutor, lieutenant governor and senator for nearly three decades, George W. Bush has been appointed to corporate boards seeking his father's influence and has been running oil companies into the ground -- and not just in the oil exploration sense. So perhaps it shouldn't surprise us that despite their equally blue blood, one of these men has been fighting for the common man and woman while the other has followed in his father's footsteps in ruining a national economy.

For me, though, the most telling difference in these men's experiences is simply this: While both went to Yale, John Kerry was something of an outsider there, for while others took summer vacations, he worked at jobs such as loading groceries at a warehouse and selling encyclopedias door to door. Some Penn students will rely on parental connections to find their jobs and to create a career, but some of us know what it's like to have to search for a summer job. I want a president who does, too.

Kevin Collins is a sophomore political science major from Milwaukee, Wis. ...And Justice For All appears on Mondays.

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