The Government Must Think Differently On How To Create Jobs

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about “creating jobs” mostly from Politicians. In addition, there’s been a lot of stories in the media done about how Politicians CANNOT create jobs. To simplify this topic down to a simple yes they can and no they can’t is silly. But I find most in the media saying that “no, the government cannot create jobs.”

There’s a lot of talk, on both side of the political spectrum, but especially on the Republican side, about how tax breaks and deregulating is going to “create jobs.” That simply hasn’t worked, because we, overall, have been doing that for years (lets not forget GE paid $0 in taxes last year) and haven’t really reaped the benefits of it.

As the New York Times’ Adam Davidson said:

Every politician currently has a “jobs plan,” very often a list of vague proposals filled with serious-sounding phrases like “budget framework” and “regulatory cap” that are designed, for the most part, to mean both everything and nothing at all.

Davidson goes on to basically say that politicians can’t create jobs. That subsidies for one industry (clean energy) and regulations for another (oil) just shift jobs from one technology to the other.

There’s some real problems with that argument. 1. we still subsidize the hell out of coal and oil, and we give major tax breaks to coal and oil. Also, while there are subsidies and tax breaks for clean energy, since corporations have helped write most of these tax break rules, a lot of times its still a raw deal for clean energy.

2. if you create, say, wind farms in states that do not produce coal (and there are only 13 states that employ more than 1,000 people in the coal industry), those jobs are NOT being taken away from one energy and moved to another, they overall should be a clear INCREASE in employment for the state.

Davidson goes on to criticize the stimulus and that it didn’t create enough jobs. Well, as former President Bill Clinton said on the Daily Show this week, the stimulus provided us a floor for how bad the recession would get. Without it, we would have most likely gone into a depression. So, the stimulus’ main goal of it wasn’t to create jobs. Sure, politicians can claim it created X amount of “shovel-ready jobs”- and it did, but it’s main goal wasn’t that.

Instead, it’d be nice if instead of talking about “deregulation” and “lowering taxes” if we just skipped all that and just employed people. What do I mean? I mean the government directly employing people. AKA a renewed Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Thomas Frank has written multiple books, including one of my favorites, What’s the Matter with Kansas, which explains in great detail why poor people vote for Conservatives, why they really shouldn’t, and some of the lunacy that goes on to court their vote (hint: it all goes back to “values” that are often drawn up only for political gain)

This month, Frank wrote a piece in Harper’s about job creation. He mentioned that Ronald Reagan, Mr. small government, said in his memoir, An American Life, that the WPA was “one of the most productive elements” of FDR’s New Deal. Frank also points out that as Governor of California, Reagan proposed a WPA-style public works program that would replace the state’s welfare program.

A similar program to this, the Civil Works Administration, employed Reagan’s dad, Jack Reagan. Here’s Frank:

the Civil Works Administration … set up in November 1933 as a desperate nation headed into its fith Depression winter. To create jobs, the CWA did not offer tax breaks or fine-tune the regulatory climate. No, the CWA simply hired unemployed people and put them to work. It was organized virtually overnight, and it did not wait for grand projects to be fleshed out: it simply sent people out into the nation’s public spheres to rake leaves, shovel snow, fix roads, dig ditches, and so on. The program’s administrator … found jobs for 4 million people in two months.

…

We do not remember these programs as evidence of a national flirtation with communism. By and large, the things they built are treasured today. … The Roosevelt Administration dealt with unemployment by putting murals in post offices, by bringing electricity to deepest Appalachia, by paying artists to paint, theater directors to stage plays, and penniless authors to assemble collections of folklore and write a famous series of guidebooks.

I’ll leave you with one more tidbit. Kevin Hasset, of the (very) conservative American Enterprise Institute, told a congressional panel in 2010 that “if the economic stimulus moneys were spent DIRECTLY hiring individuals, they would have created twenty-one million jobs.”

I say, let’s do it. Let’s stop talking about tax breaks, regulations, even subsidies to create jobs. There are a lot of great things about public-corporate partnerships. But there’s a lot of negatives to them as well. And in reality, in this economy, we don’t know what companies are going to do with those tax breaks (see: record breaking bonuses and record breaking profits for companies). We also know that there will be a big limit on how many jobs it will create, because companies are not producing a whole lot, because people are not buying a whole lot. A 21st century WPA wouldn’t have that problem. We could hire people to fix our crumbling schools in every major city in the U.S. We could have them fix the potholes on our decaying road system. They could go into libraries and digitally scan every print newspaper from the 1900s on and make it available online – for everyone. We could pay recently laid off journalists to cover local news and politics again. We could provide clean water for West Virginians who can’t drink the water from the tap because the chemicals from mountaintop removal coal mining have made it poisonous. We could build the infrastructure for high speed internet for rural towns all over the nation. We could build solar panels to power the sunbelt.

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