By John Byczkowski
Enquirer staff writer

Commerce Secretary Donald Evans discusses economic issues with the Enquirer editorial board Wednesday. The Enquirer/JOSEPH FUQUA II

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans said Wednesday that the nation's manufacturing sector "is very, very powerful, very strong," and attributed recent job losses to high productivity and better technology.

"Our workers are getting more and more productive every year, the last 30, 40 years - better skills, better training, better techniques, and part of that of course is technology," he told the Enquirer's editorial board. "Technology has played no small part in this dramatic increase in output with declining employment."

In battling the decline in manufacturing employment, Evans said President Bush has focused on increasing job training, "understanding that we have a rapidly changing economy, and there will be times in certain people's lives that they will be transitioning from one job to another job, or from one career to another career."

The health of manufacturing is a major economic issue in Ohio.

The state has seen employment in that sector fall by 20 percent, or 208,000 jobs, since February 2000. Greater Cincinnati has lost 21,500 manufacturing jobs in the last four years, or about 14 percent.

John Kerry and President Bush are locked in a too-close-to-call struggle for Ohio's votes.

Evans, a Texas oil executive who has known President Bush since the 1970s, appeared in Cincinnati the same day Kerry addressed a veterans convention downtown. The commerce secretary criticized Kerry's economic proposals.

"Under John Kerry, your taxes are going to be higher than under George Bush," he said. "George Bush believes that if you want more of something you tax it less."

Evans said most of the benefits of tax breaks to people earning more than $200,000 go to small-business owners, and "these are the people creating the jobs." Because Kerry wants to raise tax rates on those people, "it shows me a lack of understanding about how the whole system works," Evans said.

But Bush's tax cuts have helped produce large budget deficits, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to be $442 billion in 2004, up from $375 billion in 2003.

The deficits "are not welcome but they're understandable," given the recession and the war, Evans said.

Email: johnb@enquirer.com