That seems to be the question of the hour because whoever answers it correctly will come away with a November 2 victory. But is what America wants, really what America needs? There are as many answers to that as there are people to be questioned but one thing is for sure, America both wants and needs employment for the 9.6% of it’s citizens who are out of a job.
Is that practical? Can we really achieve that again in the foreseeable future? I’ve always been an optimist so I like to believe we can but only if we give up our political positions and start thinking like Americans and not Republicans or Democrats or even Tea Partyers. If we can take that first step we have at least a shot at achieving a very difficult goal.
Getting anything done in a democracy demands that we be willing to give something up in order to get something else, something that may be better. Getting anything done in a democracy entails negotiation and more negotiation over every point because everyone has an opinion and many have an agenda and most of the time they are not in line with that of their neighbor.
So what actions must the country take in order to achieve the goal of lower unemployment? Let’s look at the possible roads to that goal: Infrastructure rebuilding immediately comes to mind, followed by education, a plunge into new technology industries, the loosening of credit, tax reform and clamping down on illegal immigration. All have good aspects and bad and therefore each has supporters and subtractors. So let’s take a look at each.
The America for Americans crowd would like to close off immigration and expel all illegal immigrants thereby taking back all those jobs that that they claim were stolen from righteous citizens. I’m sure it would make some of them very happy if they could point to the electrical engineer who’s now cutting their lawn after being downsized by a aerospace company that was sold short by an unscrupulous Wall Street genius and say see, we are solving unemployment by getting rid of all the illegal immigrants who used to cut our lawns and giving the job to real Americans, but that’s not really a viable solution. I won’t go into the fact that the country is built on immigration and still imports a large percentage of its technocrats from overseas because we don’t produce enough of them here. The problem is that most Americans don’t want those jobs, especially those Americans who have benefited from union affiliations in their former employment and those who have occupied executive positions.
The jobs that immigrants hold don’t come, for the most part, with pensions, workman’s comp, unemployment insurance, health care and overtime. Most don’t come with minimum wage. So let’s just step past immigration reform as a solution to the current employment crisis.
Tax reform is another concept that seems a far stretch as a solution to unemployment. The current bible of the right on tax reform preaches that if we extend tax cuts to the super rich they will invest that money in job producing companies. It used to be called trickle down economics and has been proven to be an empty puddle. The reality is something far different. While some people have gotten rich or richer by investing in industries that produce products and therefore employ workers, most current investment by a huge percentage is made in financial products,. Financial products create no job only paper profits so the rich get richer and the poor still can’t find a job. There is no possibility of employment from the packaging of securities, only the possibility of profit.
Many feel we can manipulate corporate taxes to create employment. Getting into this is a little above my economic pay grade but what I do understand is American businesses that are in direct competition with foreign businesses would benefit from tax assistance. What is not clear is what retaliation this would bring about from said foreign competition. Tariffs’ have always been used in this situation, but it seems to me that though this would help American companies prosper it would mostly help keep jobs that already existed. Jobs that have gone overseas because of financial considerations are never coming back. If we were, for any reason, able to put pressure on say a Chinese industry that had fled the States, the jobs wouldn’t move back here because the industry wouldn’t move back here. If it had to move it would be to Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, etc where wages were even lower than in China. So let’s cross out tax reform as a potential job creator.
New technology Industries are the future. They need money to start, expand and produce. That money should come from banks (see next section) As the world begins to see a future without fossil fuels the technologies needed to replace them are already in position. This is no longer a promise for the future. This is happening here and overseas and if we don’t jump in and grab our piece of the pie, all the jobs that we need to fill here will be filled in China, Vietnam, Cambodia, India and Indonesia. If we don’t build windmills, solar panels and whatever else these new technologies need someone else will.
Loosening of credit is an area where we can look for some real help but only if we are able to shake the banking tree. Right now bankers can see better profits from producing financial products than loaning to small businesses, which can produce goods and services but which involve what they see as a greater risk. Of course all they have to do is look back two years and the stability of financial products loses a lot of their luster but the banks and Wall Street haven’t learned anything from the crash as evidenced by their continued use of these unstable financial products that caused the crash in the first place. Business and industry depend on credit flow, not just for building plant, which results in job growth but even for the maintenance of work flow, meeting payrolls, paying bills, etc. This is where congress can really do some serious good by passing legislation that would force banks to loan a percentage of their trillion dollar holdings, (yes, that’s what they’re sitting on) to small businesses to be used for employment creating projects. The bill could be structured so that the banks had to loan a certain percentage of their holdings each year to business for the specific purpose of creating new employment.
Education: This is the long term goal and the place for the long term spending. If the government has the guts to do something that is right, instead of just politically expedient, something that may not produce votes this or next election, but will have long term consequences, this is where they will spend and spend big. Unfortunately spending alone won’t do it. We also need a serious restructuring of our whole educational system, from goals to procedures. We currently spend more money per student than any country in the world and our educational system ranks 40th. That’s a disgrace. Mainly it’s due to three criteria: scheduling, unions and functionality.
The current school schedule, nine months of learning and three months off in the summer is a product of a 17th century agrarian economy where the kids had to be let out of school in the planting season in order to help their families raise & harvest the crops. More than half the kids in this country today have never seen a crop and probably less than 1% have ever worked in the fields. So why are we still scheduling our schools to accommodate this antiquated problem. We should have our schools operational all year long. Yes, kids need a break but not a three-month one. Better to have short breaks throughout the year so they don’t get stale. Also the school day should be longer but the additional time should be spent doing something practical that would be of benefit to either the school specifically or the community in general. This would engender a sense of self worth in the student and a long- range acclimation to volunteerism.
Unions are always a problem. Not because they are doing something bad but because they were born as a result of managerial abuses and have now become very strong and extremely paranoid. The result, in this particular instance is the impossibility of removing unqualified or just plan incompetent teachers. The teachers unions are terrified that if they give management an inch, management will take the whole track, which is, after all, the history of management. The result is that the only solution to a bad teacher is assassination. I have watched Randi Weingarten, the UFT president debate educators on TV and she is one smooth article. I watched her debate with a lady named Rhee, who has just jumped started the Washington, DC school system and while Ms Rhee had all the facts on her side, Ms Weingarten managed to hold her off. Now this is fun to watch and exemplary debating but it is ultimately bad for our kids. The unions must be made to back off on the bad teacher issue.
The last problem is that they are all run from a local level. I think local involvement in schools is vital but if we are to have a system that competes with those of the 39 countries that have been more successful than us, I think we need to have at the very least a national board of review that sets curriculums for the whole country. That way we have a standard to which each school system can be held and once we have that we can see who is doing a good job and who is not and make the necessary adjustments.
I have left one monumentally important piece out of this puzzle – parents. It is imperative that children live in an environment that is conducive to leaning. Too many do not. I don’t know the solution. Bad home environments come from a variety of sources, from joblessness, from various addictions, from hereditary environmental histories. It will always be the hardest part of the puzzle to solve but we must make some progress or we will forever have an educational underclass. There are many who solidify their political positions screaming about traditional welfare families and how they are dragging down the whole community. It’s true, they are but instead of punishing them with more welfare, how about trying to come up with a viable solution to their situation. Like a job.
Infrastructure: This is the quick fix with the long-term value. Our country is getting old and slowly falling apart. Bridges are sagging, roads are pothole quagmires, power delivery is 30% behind what it should be and we just don’t have the grid in place to handle the next broadband surge. We need the work done, we need the jobs and we need the money to get it on. The deficit hawks, the same ones who took us from a surplus to a trillion dollar deficit and a wrecked economy, say we can’t afford it, that we can’t saddle our children with additional debt. What we can’t saddle our children with is a failed, rotting country. With interest almost non-existent, there has never been a better time to borrow. With our banks sitting on a trillion dollars that they won’t loan, there has never been a better time to jam through legislation to force them. Now is the time to rebuild America and to do it with people who are desperate for those jobs. A project on the level of the 1930’s WPA would shave that 9.6% unemployment down to under 4%.
So where are we? Caught in the center of a vicious cycle where no new jobs are being created so there is no money to purchase products and deplete inventory so there is no need for hiring to create products for which there is no demand.
How do we get out of the cycle? Create products that are not reliant on consumer demand, products that are their own reward and which benefit society simply because they exist.
What are these products? Roads, bridges, power grids, pipelines, broadband, a modern high-speed national rail system and public transportation. Our country needs these things. It needs them now. Let’s see if our government has the intestinal fortitude to move ahead with them. Lets see if the loyal opposition has the patriotism to back them even if it doesn’t mean votes.