Nine Big Ideas to Beat Unemployment

[babylonsister]

Hey Obama, Here are 9 Big Ideas to Beat Unemployment
Derek Thompson


The White House is hosting a job summit today to brainstorm ways to tackle unemployment. The numbers are familiar -- 10.2 percent unemployed; another 7 percent underemployed -- but the widespread pain they represent is extraordinary. Think of it this way. The number of unemployed Americans is currently about 16 million. That's the population of Pennsylvania and Connecticut combined. If you factor in underemployed workers, you get a population larger than the state of Texas. More than eight million have lost their jobs since December 2007. That's New Jersey. Almost six million Americans have been unemployed for more than six months. That's everyone in Maryland.

Beyond the numbers, the jobs crisis is multidimensional. Most importantly, those millions of Americans represent devastated families, broken investments and uprooted dreams for their children. But they also represent devastated consumer demand for products and services, which discourages employers from investing and hiring, feeding a vicious cycle. Politically, high unemployment mocks the White House's hundreds of billions of stimulus dollars and leaves incumbents vulnerable in 2010.

Unemployment in America deserves the White House's attention, which is why I'm cautiously optimistic about today's "jobs summit" where the administration will field advice from economists and public policy experts about how to slay this beast. To that end, I offer this menu of job stimulus ideas for White House fiscal policy with an eye out for pros and cons.

Here they are, without much editorializing, listed in order of how likely it is that they will be in a jobs stimulus bill.

1) Direct aid to states
State governments have been decimated by the recession, forcing them to to make steep cuts to programs like education to avoid deficits. Direct state aid would avoid these potentially devastating cuts.

For: It's simple: direct aid would save state government jobs (the first stimulus saved an estimated 250,000 education jobs). Now that private sector industries like manufacturing are beginning to rebound while state government continue to face a new wave of job cuts, we should be focusing on saving crucial state jobs and services.

Against: Some argue that the key to job growth is stoking private sector businesses to hire, rather than padding what they see as already-bloated state government rosters with easy money.

8 more...

http://business.theatlantic.com/2009/12/jobs_summit_menu_a_guide_to_job_stimulus_ideas.php

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

1. 1) Get a job.

:patriot:

[babylonsister]

2. Not as easy as typing that.

:patriot:

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

4. Not even close.

[NightWatcher]

3. my apprehension about public works or infrastructure projects is

that they will be contracted out to mega firms who will underbid local firms and then turn around and hire illegals to do the jobs that we should be getting. Here they are building a new courthouse project and they've found that 1 in 3 employees were undocumented and not receiving wages "on par" with what union workers or other highly skilled workers would be earning. The contractor has been caught twice now using large numbers of illegal immigrants and treating them poorly.

I would like, and volunteer for, a new CCC like the one that built the Blue Ridge Parkway. It needs to be government run on a daily basis.

[Hestia]

7. Not sure how it works now, but in the good old days (1960-1980)

the contracts had to hire local businesses and from minority or women owned businesses. That kept the money local.

[denverbill]

5. How about hiring 10,000 new Immigration enforcement officers?

Let them sift through the millions of invalid social security numbers and find illegal immigrants and fine the employers who hired them $10K a pop. Use $1000 to buy an airplane ride home for the illegal immigrant, $3000 for funding the INS or as a bonus for the INS agent, and $6000 to fund programs for unemployed Americans and those without health insurance.

[endless october]

6. i've got two that would work.

immediate public works program to build non-CO2 electrical infrastructure on the scale of the interstate highway program of the 1950s. Nuclear, solar, wind, etc.
(paid for by ending involvement in undeclared wars and ending the drug war.)

large tariffs on imports made by non-OSHA compliant foreign labor or imports made in factories abroad that do not observe US pollution controls.

that should make a serious dent in the problem.