Leo Hindery, Jr., Leo W. Gerard and Sen. Don Riegle exclaim, It's all about the Jobs!
Our national goals, in the medium term, must be to near fully employ those 30 million currently unemployed American workers, and in the process to more than double the number of Americans working in manufacturing, which is the least amount needed to get our economy back on track sustainably.
It's all about jobs -- whatever it takes!
I will reprint their main policy recommendations, all topics we've covered here.
- Fund a 10-year (not the current two-year) program of significant public investment to upgrade and rebuild our nation's infrastructure, which will provide the much-needed foundation for higher-value added production and advanced business services.
- Adopt "Buy American" requirements related to all federal procurement, which now makes up about 20% of the US economy. America appears to be the only nation among the major developed nations and China without a significant "buy domestic" procurement program, and we need one desperately for our own economic recovery and global competitiveness.
- Enact major corporate tax reform to incent corporations to create jobs here and to eliminate the current incentives for them to relocate manufacturing and service jobs abroad. This reform should include reducing the corporate income tax and payroll tax and moving to a value-added-tax or VAT to replace that lost revenue.
- Make loans and credit facilities readily available to the nation's small and medium size businesses and manufacturers, which desperately need them while the likes of Goldman Sachs and the major banks are succoring off of US Government guarantees and TARP monies but not lending to these smaller companies. (How foolish indeed was it to let CIT, which every day loans money to 950,000 small and medium size businesses, essentially fail for lack of an "angel" in the Treasury Department, while Treasury continues to resuscitate but barely reform the errant Wall Street banks that precipitated this financial crisis.)
I suggest reading the entire post, it's loaded with facts, statistics we write about every day on this blog, including a VAT.
Their article was written on the left leaning site, so once again the above policy recommendations amplify how many of these issues are not left-right but instead smart and to not enact them is stupid.
Folks it's one thing to point out all of the dire statistics on the real state of main street, but one really needs to demand, from this government, very specific policies and legislation you want to get passed. The solutions are there, we simply need to identify them and push for them.
Put your peddle to the metal and shift that paradigm baby!
We are so fixated on the supply side
that I wonder if we forget that fundamentally this is a demand side problem (maybe Wall St just doesn't want to hear it, as that would mean hiring people and paying real wages.) That was the very first thing Geithner said in his first testimony to Congress -- and so far all we've gotten out of them is a stimulus bill too heavily skewed to tax cuts. The President talks up the stimulus but doesn't lay the political groundwork for the necessity of structural change in economic policy. The Republicans will sacrifice their first-born to get the President to fail, and the swing vote Blue Dogs are walking around with ever bigger and flashier For Sale signs (maybe we should call them Red Lights instead). Once health care is done we have an even bigger fight on our hands.