Checking Claims on Economy, Bin Laden Hunt

WASHINGTON, Oct. 26, 2004 -- -- The economy and the war on terror have emerged as two of the major issues in this presidential race, so it is perhaps not surprising that the candidates continue to make myriad misrepresentations about facts surrounding those issues.

Monday night in Green Bay, Wis., Sen. John Kerry brought up his favorite critique about President Bush's economic record -- the subject of the outsourcing of American jobs.

"The president has a policy where he takes your tax money and he gives a great big tax break that rewards the companies that take the jobs for going overseas," Kerry said.

Does Bush have a policy of tax breaks for companies that outsource?

"It's misleading to imply that somehow the Bush administration created or originated these tax breaks," said Martin Sullivan of Tax Notes Magazine. "They've been around for decades."

Sullivan pointed out that in the past few years, since the end of the Clinton administration, there has been an acceleration in the use of such tax breaks, and that Kerry has targeted the tax breaks for elimination and Bush has not.

In Onalaska, Wis., today, Bush said 9/11 was to blame for the loss of a million American jobs.

"We were attacked and those attacks cost us about a million jobs in the three months after Sept. 11," Bush said.

But economists say that number is an overstatement, since it counts all job losses after Sept. 11, 2001, as being the result of the attacks. Experts with the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics say "it is not possible" to calculate which jobs were lost because of 9/11 and which were from "a generally weakening employment trend that had been evident for several months prior" to the attacks.

The president also likes to discuss Kerry's economic record, highlighting their different views on taxes.

"You tell your friends and neighbors, he voted against the child credit, marriage penalty relief, lower tax rates," Bush told a Davenport, Iowa, crowd on Monday.