The bill approved last week shows that the Americans （）.

A．have been carried away with their fear of the gloomy employment prospect
B．will be able to deliver more money than value to the taxpayers
C．decide that they would lay more emphasis on value than money
D．are becoming very curious about the government’s outsourcing contracts

Another month, another dismal set of job figures. America pulled out of its last economic recession way back in November 2001, yet the country’s "jobs recession" finished only last autumn, when 2.7 million jobs had been lost since the start of the slowdown. Now, though economic growth has bounced back, new jobs refuse to do the same in this, the third year of recovery. In February, a mere 21,000 jobs were created, according to the official payroll survey, at a time when George Bush’s economists forecast 2.6 million new jobs for 2004 mounting alarm at the White House, and increased calls for protection against what a growing number of Americans see as the root of most ills: the "outsourcing" of jobs to places like China and India. Last week the Senate approved a bill that forbids the outsourcing of government contracts--a curious case of a government guaranteeing not to deliver value-for-money to taxpayers. American anxiety over the economy appears to have tipped over into paranoia and self-delusion.

Too strong Not really. As The Economist has recently argued--though in the face of many angry readers--the jobs lost are mainly a cyclical affair, not a structural one. They must also be set against the 24 million new jobs created during the 1990s. Certainly, the slow pace of job-creation today is without precedent, but so were the conditions that conspired to slow a booming economy at the beginning of the decade. A stock market bubble burst, and rampant business investment slumped. Then, when the economy was down, terrorist attacks were followed by a spate of scandals that undermined public trust in the way companies were run. These acted as powerful headwinds and, in the face of them, the last recession was remarkably mild. By the same token, the recovery is mild, too. Still, in the next year or so, today’s high productivity growth will start to translate into more jobs. Whether that is in time for Mr. Bush is another matter.

As for outsourcing, it is implausible now, as Lawrence Katz at Harvard University argues, to think that outsourcing has profoundly changed the structure of the American economy over just the past three or four years. After all, outsourcing was in full swing--both in manufacturing and in services--throughout the job-creating 1990s. Government statisticians reckon that outsourced jobs are responsible for well under 1% of those signed up as unemployed. And the jobs lost to outsourcing pale in comparison with the number of jobs lost and created each month at home.