Bush and Kerry differ on job fixes

By The Associated Press and The Washington Post

CHARLES DHARAPAK / AP President Bush yesterday at a Missouri rally called opponent John Kerry "one of the trial lawyers' most reliable allies in the Senate."

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Kerry, moving aggressively in the face of polls showing his candidacy lagging, used the latest forecast of a record budget deficit to bolster his contention that Bush is leading the country in the wrong direction.

With the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicting this year's federal deficit will reach $422 billion — less than earlier forecasts but the highest ever in dollar terms — Kerry told a crowd in North Carolina that the deficit represented other bad Bush choices.

"Only George W. Bush could celebrate over a record budget deficit of $422 billion, a loss of 1.6 million jobs and Medicare premiums that are up by a record 17 percent," Kerry said. "W stands for wrong, the wrong direction for America."

The Bush administration described the lower deficit prediction as positive economic news.

In his second day of campaigning in Missouri, a state he won in 2000 by 79,000 votes of 2.3 million cast, Bush told a rally in suburban Kansas City that Kerry had stood in the way of legal reforms that would help generate jobs and protect workers and businesses. He called Kerry "one of the trial lawyers' most reliable allies in the Senate."

Bush, linking Kerry policies to campaign donations from trial attorneys, said "junk lawsuits" hinder job creation and cost the economy more than $230 billion a year.

Kerry said he would end tax breaks for companies that outsource overseas, a potent issue in North Carolina and other states that have suffered job losses.

"Because of George Bush's wrong choices, this country is continuing to ship good jobs overseas, jobs with good wages and good benefits," Kerry said.

Kerry's plan to deal with outsourcing of jobs would eliminate rules allowing companies to defer paying taxes on income earned by their foreign subsidiaries until they bring the profits back to the United States. Kerry said that would ensure that U.S. companies will be taxed on their foreign subsidiaries' profits just like they are taxed on their domestic profits.

"He's actually encouraging the export of American jobs," Kerry said of Bush's support for the current rules.
 
The president's plan for dealing with job losses is through job training, increased funding for community colleges and creation of "opportunity zones" of reduced taxes.

Bush said the jobs picture is improving, largely because of tax cuts that he said have helped push down the unemployment rate to 5.4 percent.

Meanwhile, Vice President Dick Cheney warned yesterday that if Kerry is elected, "the danger is that we'll get hit again" by terrorists.

Campaigning in Des Moines, Iowa, Cheney went beyond previous restraints to suggest that the country would be more vulnerable to attack under Kerry.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on November 2nd, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again," he said, "that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and that we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set, if you will, that in fact these terrorist attacks are just criminal acts and that we are not really at war."

The Kerry campaign called Cheney's claim "un-American" and said the Bush campaign would not be able to "distract the American people" from problems in Iraq and with the U.S. economy.

Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwards, interviewed aboard his plane after leaving Ohio, said of Cheney's comments: "What he said was meant to scare voters, period. And it's completely contrary to what's in the best interest of the American people. ... It was way over the top and I think un-American."

In Missouri, meanwhile, Bush seized on Kerry's statement Monday that Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time," noting that Kerry had borrowed the words of his one-time rival Howard Dean.

Kerry "woke up yesterday morning with yet another new position, and this one is not even his own," Bush said to laughter from supporters during a three-city Missouri bus tour. "He even used the same words Howard Dean did, back when he supposedly disagreed with him. No matter how many times Senator Kerry flip-flops, we were right to make America safer by removing Saddam Hussein from power."

Nader won't be on

ballot in Virginia

RICHMOND, Va. — Virginia election officials yesterday denied a spot on November's presidential ballot to independent candidate Ralph Nader, and an independent review of the signatures he submitted suggests thousands of were collected illegally by people who do not live in Virginia.

Jean Jensen, secretary of the State Board of Elections, said registrars across the state had verified 7,342 signatures for Nader, well short of the required 10,000. Candidates for the Libertarian Party and the Constitution Party will appear on the ballot, Jensen said.

Nader spokesman Kevin Zeese vowed a review of the signatures that were rejected in Virginia, saying the campaign would "check and see if they got it right, and if they didn't, we'll sue them."