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A Review by Telis Demos

Todd Buchholz, the White House's Director of Economic Policy during George H.W. Bush's administration, begins Bringing the Jobs Home in a surprising fashion: "Too many mainstream conservatives have ignored the outsourcing wave ... their knees jerk to ideology." Mon dieu! A former Bush adviser rebuking conservatives, giving credence to liberals' worries about the economy, and eschewing ideology. Perhaps we've misjudged the Bushies all along. Or maybe not. Because within a few paragraphs of those heterodox sentences, it's business as usual. Why do businesses outsource? Because do-gooder liberals (or "nasty tax collectors," "dull school bureaucrats," and "sharp lawyers" in Buchholz's lexicon) have chased them out of the country with the high costs of hiring new workers. The solution? Tax cuts, less regulation, tax cuts, less Big Hollywood, tax cuts, stricter education standards, tax cuts, fewer trial lawyers. And tax cuts.

For Buchholz, unlike Democratic critics of outsourcing, the problem isn't that American jobs are taken by cheap foreign labor; it's that the U.S. economy and U.S. workers aren't strong enough to make jobs for themselves in the wake of jobs lost to outsourcing. As a result, his argument is not that we should slow the pace of outsourced business, but that we should allow American workers to compete fairly by removing government straitjackets ("All we have to lose is our chains," charmingly) on hiring workers, starting businesses, innovating new products, and importing skilled foreigners who will do all those things. In fact, the prescriptive aspects of his book really aren't about outsourcing at all.

As a result, all of Buchholz's seeming pragmatism about the thorny issue of job loss is absorbed into a generic, largely right-wing set of recycled policy thoughts that are only marginally interesting. It's hard to disagree that improving the education system, getting rid of outdated job licenses, and exporting more big ideas are good things for helping America create jobs. But it's easy to argue that the biggest barriers to hiring new workers are not the Social Security and Medicare taxes; that Hollywood's lack of "family values" is not what foreign audiences dislike about American movies; and that not all lawsuits are of the hot-coffee-in-lap variety. At any rate, even if these are problems, repeatedly bashing Ted Kennedy (the book's most frequent bad guy) doesn't seem like a very constructive way to solve them.

Buchholz does say one revealing thing about outsourcing itself. In response to the charge that he is advocating an America-led "brain drain" of skilled immigrants from abroad, Buchholz writes: "My purpose in this book is to address the perverse incentives built into U.S. policies and to raise the chances that the United States survives and thrives in this century. I would hope that the United States pursues its enlightened national interests. If not, we might as well trade in the Senate for the U.N. Security Council." Is this really how some conservatives see the world -- as a zero-sum game of our economic gain and their economic loss? If so, then squaring Buchholz's narrow national-interest economic policies with the president's idealistic foreign policies can't be easy. How do you explain to the world that America-style freedom means the freedom to have your skilled workers taken away and your unskilled workers turned away? To have Hollywood (a Hollywood that has rediscovered "family values," to be sure) crowd out your own cultural products? To suffer relentless U.S. tax cuts that devalue the dollar and make foreign workers more expensive to American businesses? This is a conservative economic nationalism that is every bit as reprehensible as the America-first economic nationalism of the left. All we have to lose is our chains, according to Buchholz, but as for what the rest of the world has to lose -- who cares?

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