On Monday, Valerie Jarrett asked members of the White House group on LinkedIn to provide their views on this.
What steps do you think government should take to help American businesses spur job creation?
On Wednesday the President is giving a major speech to the Business Roundtable. As a senior advisor to the President, I wanted to spark a dialogue in advance of the speech about this important question. We’ll be following this thread and later in the week I’ll follow up with a post responding.
While I didn’t get in right away, I did add my opinion (on page 43 of the comments).
What creates jobs is three things: a need to be fulfilled, someone qualified to fill that need, and money to pay the qualified person.
1. Both businesses and individuals should be rewarded for innovation, technical or otherwise, and for embracing new solutions as they become available.
2. Education should be fixed so that people don’t go into bankruptcy over it and in a way that all trades in demand can be properly filled with people.
3. Any funds that are given to businesses on the government’s tab, must have their usage specified and accounted for. No checks with a generic “make things better” demand.Underlining these points is the idea of self-sufficiency. What is provided by the government should always come with the goal of making people and businesses more capable of supporting themselves. Not just patching holes with annual loans to businesses that failed to manage their own money to start with or talking about unemployment like it’s a dress without a person to wear it.
Of course, this is a rather simplified view of the situation, and in a sense, dreamy. However, I do feel strongly that there is a lot of inclination to point fingers in random directions rather than thinking about the real issue. Many comments suggested that outsourcing was the problem, that the government itself was to blame, or that taxes were in some way or another the issue. While these things certainly have downsides, simply tossing anger at those subjects is disregarding WHY those things are problems in the first place.
For instance, companies don’t outsource just because they’re feeling unpatriotic, it’s because companies feel that outsourcing is the most beneficial option for the company. If you had the choice between paying someone a flat fee for mowing your lawn and having to pay someone a flat fee to mow your lawn plus had to cover their health insurance, cover their training for using your mower, and regularly pay out other bonuses to keep them employed, who are you honestly going to hire? Probably the first person because it’s simple to work out and simple to calculate in your budget. US citizens are expensive to hire and keep employed.
So if we want businesses to hire locally, then they either need the employing process eased up or the have the government set down incentives that both small and large businesses can take advantage of, in order to cover the costs of keeping local people employed. Otherwise, you might get someone to hire locally, but they won’t keep the employee hired for long and high turnout isn’t much better than outright high unemployment. We need to encourage careers, not short job rounds.
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