We know from polling and focus groups that the administration's basic message on the economy (where's the love America, we got you out of the economic ditch with one hand while fighting with the Tea Party on the other) is not cutting it. The current Obama call for more roads and bridges infrastructure and long-term R&D also leaves Americans flat. I gather the president may get a taste for that on his bus tour this week.
So what to do with grumpy voters and a dysfunctional Congress?
The administration said yesterday that it is looking for "new" ideas. That's a pretty high bar -- so let me instead offer a new lens given the on-the-ground realities we see out there as our Next Economy Partnership Project interviews entrepreneurs, voters and community leaders about what's missing from the debate on Washington.
The answer is simple: Go Local. The solutions we need for job creation are bubbling up in communities and the public strongly supports a national job creation strategy, implemented locally and bottom up.
While voters are skeptical that government spending alone creates jobs, they know it plays a key role in attracting private capital to create new industries like the Internet and clean energy.
Through this new lens, the welcome role of the federal government -- and presidential leadership -- is to help local communities build on their unique competitive strengths, and the current top-down nature of federal infrastructure, economic development, and workforce programs aren't doing the trick.
In essence, just as we need a smart macro strategy to accelerate private investment we need a new "micro strategy" to catalyze 21st century business growth.
Here's the funny part: the more we describe to voters what this will involve in nerdy detail -- from investing in new "innovation infrastructure" to creating low-cost mechanisms like community job creation councils that give citizens a seat at the table -- the more excited they get that we are moving in the right direction.
So how can we go local, do more for less and build the new partnerships and mechanisms we need to drive our economic recovery now, much like the WPAs, TVAs and so on did in the 1930s?
1. Animating Idea: "Regions Rise Together" -- Not "Race to the Top"
By allowing local communities and states to best decide their needs, the federal government can focus on the overall results a program is supposed to deliver.
Nothing will pass in Congress now, but come 2013, it is clear that there will be a group of bipartisan Governors and business leaders who will want to move towards new performance-based government and flexible block granting of their money. Forget time-consuming grant competitions for small amounts of experimental funding programs designed by Washington bureaucrats. What we need is a new Acceleration Agenda.
Picture this: a new generation of post-partisan leaders will want to bundle what few federal resources are left (for workforce training, infrastructure, economic development, energy investment etc) and create the outcomes they want to create jobs their way. Interested regions will petition the federal government to get more flexible funding and fewer mandates, and the competitive value of the "race to the top" concept can be offered up as bonus funding for those that deliver on their promises -- not a zero-sum competition pitting states and regions against each other.
2. Federal Role In The New Framework: Catalyze and Certify What's Smart
We can boost up bottom-up economic success by lifting up the small business owners, the Governors, the Mayors, the innovators and other community leaders who are busy pouring the wet cement on a new American foundation, beyond Pennsylvania Avenue.
How? Encourage regional infrastructure planning, collaborative best practices and public-private partnerships designed to accelerate bottom up innovation and replicable local success stories. Innovation zones could then get certified for special support or funding based on such factors as:
• Completion of collaborative business plans with wide community involvement
• Presence of public-private partnerships
• Smart sustainability project investment criteria.
• Locally-sourced manufacturing that focuses on local suppliers
There are a number of small programs already advancing aspects of this vision that the President can cite: such as Startup America and the Jobs and Innovation Accelerationinitiative.
3. Redefine 21st Century Infrastructure: Not Just Roads and Bridges -- New Innovative Mechanisms
We currently spend over $140 billion on federal economic development programs that are very top-down, stove-piped and inflexible. We could do more for less if we gave communities and regions more flexibility to invest in what they though they needed to spur local job creation -- and tied it to results.
Some ideas to reform economic development and empower local communities include:
• Local job creation councils -- Groups of local business people and civic leaders come together to steer federal funding to local priorities in designated Growth Zones and self-identified clusters while meeting clear accountability and performance goals. Such local community councils are better able to deploy local assets and overcome partisan gridlock.
• Solution centers -- While web applications and open data are critical advances we are seeing emerge from the Obama administration, sometimes (like those Esurance ads) people need intermediaries (translation, a human). One stop centers for federal and state economic development would offer direct frontline connections and support ranging from rural and small community loans (USDA), to free entrepreneurship training, to new SBA programs targeting the equity needs of small businesses and startups that deliver two-thirds of net job creation.
• Innovative finance and flexible federal funding -- By allowing local communities and states to best decide their needs, the federal government can focus on the overall results a program is supposed to deliver. The newly proposed BUILD Act, which is designed to leverage private capital to dramatically reduce the taxpayer costs of infrastructure projects and spur state infrastructure banks like California's Infrastructure and Economic Development Bank, is a perfect example.
Summing Up
No one has a magic bullet to turn around an economy with 14 million unemployed, 14 million homes underwater and 46 million American on food stamps.
But voters of all political stripes believe that a national effort to accelerate smart local job creation strategies and build out the missing bottom up implementation mechanisms we need to raise our economic game in the 21st century infrastructure is the right path.
Bipartisan business leaders are on board, as are Governors and Mayors.
Instead of talking about how the stimulus saved America and focusing on what he and Congress might do, President Obama could find a warmer welcome in local communities if he painted a new picture of how the federal government intends to be a smarter partner with local business and entrepreneurs who are already creating the seeds of Economy 2.0. This bottom-up approach was the hallmark of his campaign. Now it's time for it to the hallmark of his Administration.
Gene Marks: 65 People Who Could Care Less About My Small Business
The shelves are packed with lower priced inferior goods made overseas by other American companies who have offshored our jobs in the name of profits.Meanwhile Rural Americans have to drive further using more expensive gas to get the items they need .
The solution to this dilemna will cost the entire country more money, Made in America is more expensive(but was once and will be again far superior in quality) because our workforce demands a living wage and the only way that will happen is with changes to the tax code to eliminate loopholes and make it more expensive for employers to build overseas than it is here. Enticing American job creation with tax incentives only partially works Jobs will come only if there is a demand for a product ,once American made products are available and not undercut in price by cheap foreign labor the demand for them will increase
These new funds are riskier than communities are typically used to, but it is a bold acknowledgement that economic development can come not only from attracting established businesses to the area, but from growing new, local companies organically. In recognizing the importance of entrepreneurs in creating wealth and jobs, these communities are identifying the role they can play in supporting them. And, while they’re doing it within their defined city or county lines, they’re accelerating it by leveraging partnerships across 21 counties of Northeast Ohio, knowing these organizations can provide deal flow, incubator space and technical assistance for the entrepreneurs they invest in.
Advocating for and providing new funds or programs with the back office support they need is a big part of what JumpStart does. And we support this because any community that starts its own fund is creating an environment that encourages and supports its entrepreneurs... its job creators.
An almost unknown nuclear peril, worse than the threat of a terror attack, can generate massive numbers of local jobs.
See www.aesopinstitute.org for an overview of the problem and the urgent need for decentralized energy.
A huge solar flare occurred on August 5th. If the burp had hit our geomagnetic field NOAA and NASA suggest it might have collapsed the power grid in huge areas of the nation for months.
A nuclear plant without grid power for a month is a meltdown candidate.
Mobilizing to prevent that from happening is an urgent, unrecognized, need.
And installing decentralized energy systems to prevent emergencies can employ millions in local communities.
I am convinced of that.