"Everybody talks about the weather," said Charles Dudley Warner, "but nobody does anything about it." These days everybody complains about unemployment, but nobody does anything about it.
To be sure, some people offer suggestions. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) proposes the Bring Jobs Back to America Act, which would organize a new strategy to rebuild manufacturing, possibly including new tax breaks for companies that return jobs to the U.S.
The President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, chaired by GE's Jeffrey Immelt, suggests training workers through partnerships at community colleges, cutting red tape to speed creation of jobs, boosting travel and tourism by easing the visa process, offering more help to small business owners and putting jobless construction workers to work on energy projects.
As has been emphasized by the Manufacturing Institute, our schools are not preparing people for jobs in the real world. One of the biggest challenges to job creation is the skills deficit. To compound that problem, workers are losing mobility -- at least partly because of the housing collapse. If your mortgage is under water -- and almost a fourth of them are -- you cannot pack up and move to a job somewhere else. In the 1950s, one in five Americans moved every year; now it's one in 10.
But the unemployment challenge is so great -- 16 million people -- we must be more creative and willing to try anything that is reasonable, including the following:
I bet you have your own ideas for job creation. Share them with me and I'll pass them along.
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2) Make it illegal to discriminate against the unemployed.
3) Issue NO more H1B visas. Let them expire without renewal.
4) Renew the tax credit for employers who hire anyone unemployed more than 26 weeks.
5) FREE (not just subsidized loans or grants) university education for any laid-off workers who have been unemployed more than one year.
Yeah, let’s give corporations that already pay zero to minimal taxes MORE TAX-FREE PROFITS.
Yeah, let’s pass MORE FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS - NAFTA created millions of American jobs, didn’t it? Get real, those thousands of new jobs would be in Panama, Columbia and South Korea.
Yeah, let’s give basic survival UI benefits meant for the jobless and SUBSIDIZE the very private sector who OUTSOURCED their jobs to begin with.
Yeah, let’s make the R&D tax credit permanent - it’ll help support all those R&D jobs and tech we’re GIVING AWAY to foreign countries.
All these "fixes" are pure 24K suckage.
Still shilling crap in the interests of manufacturers who outsource our jobs wholesale by the millions.
You have no credibility with these worse than lame solutions.
The only "reasonable" fix is to BRING BACK our jobs from overseas.
That is not going to happen, certainly not in the short term. Maybe when peak oil really hits home. But not now. So we need other ideas and solutions.
B. Instead of using tractors and such for farming, why not start a farm and pay people to mend the fields
C. Develop a co-op (this for that) approach, instead of using a currency for growth,
D. Create a national bank with a separate currency used to pay its citizens as well as find stuff for people to do.
E. If automation is so high, there is no need for workers, well this is tricky...
AB
Please preach this failed strategy elsewhere.
We need domestic jobs in ALL industries that support good education, good health & good business practices by recirculating wages thru local businesses & not letting them fly out to India, Germany or Bentonville.
http://www.citizen.org/documents/testimony-ways-and-means-korea-jan-2011.pdf
Testimony of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch
House Ways and Means Committee Hearing on the
Pending Free Trade Agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia
"...Government and independent estimates show that approval of any of these trade agreements, which replicate many terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), will be a net negative for U.S. jobs, our economy, reining in Wall Street abuses, and the environment. Moreover, they will open a wide range of routine public interest policies to attack outside of the U.S. court system, where multinational corporations will be empowered to make claims on taxpayer funds for measures that interfere with investors’ expectations or future expected profits. At a time of high unemployment, it would be politically perilous for any member of Congress to vote for any NAFTA-style trade deal that is expected to kill jobs, much less the most economically significant one since NAFTA..."
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This is a rightwing talking point with no basis in reality. It's just one more way of putting down ordinary Americans: you're not good enough for a job. But ask people making the claim exactly what skills are missing, and you get nothing or, at best, anecdotes.
Now, if we really did have a skill deficit, then the wages those jobs pay would have soared. Whenever something is scarce relative to its demand, its price goes up. That's basic economics. Yet we see no such rises in pay, so don't be fooled. There is no skill deficit.
Robert, I agree with most of your points with the exception of these being "rightwing talking points". The party elites from both sides love these policies. They enrich Wall Street and provide the Democrats voters. In fact the "education" solution is a match made in heaven. The Democrats get to send funding to the schools, and the corporations (who the Republican elites love) are basically given a grace period, and won't be expected to hire Americans until some time in the infinite future when "qualified" workers are available. American job destruction is truly a bipartisan effort.
Your only choice is to learn new skill sets, or be left behind.
That IS your 2 choices.
Agreement (1994)
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jerry-jasinowski/10/32b/abb
Sadly, though many of us remember the steps taken by the last Republican administration that set us up for this fall, it is probable that many do not. Anyone remember "WMD"? "Mission Accomplished"? "an Ownership Society"? Encouragement from the highest levels of government to run out and buy that house with those ARMs and sub-prime loans? How about "Buy now! or you'll never get into the market."
bull crap that gets thrown their way. We are being screwed, it's about time we stand up, instead
of bending over. Semper Fi