A View from Left Field- Jobs

Back in 1992 Ross Perot foresaw the sucking sounds of jobs leaving the United States.  Many companies were even rewarded with tax breaks for enabling this dastardly deed to happen.  Well it’s all coming home to roost as Americans young and old are clamoring, “where’s my job?’

The Wall Street Squatters’ movement has taken on national proportions because mainstream citizens across the country are losing their stake in the communities they live in.  The cost of education has reached a high water mark, yet jobs have become fewer as applicants for them have become greater.  What’s a President to do?

First, make it priority one to bring employment to the citizenry.  Infra-structure is an excellent place to start.  President Obama’s stimulus package was the right idea, only it was miss-directed.  Instead of bailing out the ”banksters” that made fundamentally bad speculative investments in real estate and exotic stock market products, the dollars should have gone to rebuilding our crumbling foundation.  Begin with roads, bridges, high speed public transportation and job re-training and expand from there.       

Instead of shuttering some of our regional and national parks, put people to work sprucing them up.  Then they’ll have more appeal to tourists from our country and abroad, and I’m sure these efforts will cash flow positively.

President Roosevelt led the way in the Depression plagued 1930s by bringing business, labor and all elements of society together to tackle the Herculean task that confronted the nation.  While it took FDR time to energize his plan, he got the country moving by working with all factions, Democrats and Republicans alike.  Today, President Obama needs to accelerate progress by taking a few plays out of Mr. Roosevelt’s game-book.  My advice is, stop pandering to those who seek to chop your legs off, and start moving ahead with the largest support group you can muster up.

In the last few days it seems that President Obama finally got the message.  He moved to stabilize the real estate market by allowing homeowners upside down in their properties to opt for lower interest rates on their mortgages through Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac.  Also, he assisted college students with government loans, by declaring that after paying a fixed percentage of their yearly income for 20 years, any monies still due on those loans will be forgiven.  Bold stances such as these will pump prime the economy short and long term.

This is the brightest and most resourceful nation on earth.  Let’s put our technology to work and bring home some of the jobs that we forfeited over the last 20 years.  Combining machinery with American ingenuity we can offset the lower wages paid foreign workers with greater productivity here at home.  We won’t get every job back, but it will be a trend in the right direction.  Also, we must stop rewarding companies that export jobs and give incentives to those who employ our citizens.

Today especially, the world is open to new frontiers.  A green environment, renewable energy, outer space and new technology applied to the internet are all areas we excel in.  We let the Industrial Age pass us by when stopped making things.  Let’s reverse that trend and exert some “mental muscle” to take the lead and jobs back.  It’s not too late, but we’d better get “cracking!”