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For years parents told their kids to stay away from factory jobs - no future there - and avoid a life of layoffs. Go to college. Study hard. Get a degree in computer science or software engineering. The kids who followed that advice were avoiding the blue-collar hardships of their parents.Or so they thought.


Now the term "outsourcing" refers as often to the loss of white-collar jobs overseas as it does to manufacturing work. We used to tell kids that their economic future lies with "brains, not brawn." Those days may be gone.According to one estimate, the United States will lose more than 3 million information technology and service sector jobs to foreign competition over the next 12 years. The days when white-collar work meant job security are also gone.


One startling development in recent months is that high school dropouts now have a lower unemployment rate than college graduates, according to one research group, the Economic Policy Institute. That may suggest we have more bad jobs available than good ones. But the problem is not just outsourcing. A new poll shows that more than 60 percent of Americans are somewhat or very concerned about job outsourcing. They say the issue will be a key factor when they vote for a president this fall.


Outsourcing has become the buzzword of this political campaign, but many economists say that only about 1 percent of layoffs are due to outsourcing. The real issue is closer to home: Our economic policies are not working.


The policies have helped Wall Street, not Main Street. Corporate profits are up 30 percent while wages, after taking inflation into account, are up just 0.5 percent.Most of all, the Bush economic plan isn't working because millions of Americans aren't working.


The economy is growing but experts are increasingly perplexed by our jobless recovery. They say the Bush economic plan should have worked, but hasn't. What went wrong and what will work is what this presidential campaign should be about. Despite a $1 trillion tax cut - an astonishingly large economic stimulus - combined with incredibly low interest rates and robust government spending, we have lost 2.4 million jobs in the past three years.


Manufacturing employment has fallen for 43 consecutive months. Forty percent of the unemployed have been out of work for more than 15 weeks. And so many discouraged jobless workers have dropped out of the work force that, if they hadn't given up, our unemployment rate would be 7.4 percent, not 5.6 percent. As USA Today has noted, the tax cuts that Bush showered on businesses have not produced results. The millions of new jobs predicted by the White House never surfaced.


Instead, corporations have pocketed the money, fattening profits and boosting stock dividends by 19 percent over the past two years.


They used to call this trickle down economics. The little guy who's trying to make a living would call it a rip-off.


The president said lowering capital gains taxes would spark investment and increase employment. Instead, corporate America has used the tax break to buy new machinery and technology that allows it to crank out products with fewer workers. The president said reducing the "double taxation" on stock dividends would boost business and promote expansion. But it appears the result is that corporations are trying to boost dividends at the expense of workers' jobs and wages.


Bush is stubbornly staying the course, pushing to make these ineffective and expensive tax cuts permanent. John Kerry seems effective at blasting Bush, but not at producing innovative ideas. To fix the mess, maybe we should start by tying business tax cuts to the number of jobs a company creates and retains. No more lucrative tax breaks with no strings attached.


The Washington economists who advise Bush and Kerry can debate the fine points of our current policies. But a lot of us already know this: A factory worker who's nearing retirement - one with substantial seniority, the last of a dying breed - has a better, more secure job than his kid who decided to study computers and get a degree. That wasn't such a smart move after all.