Robert Reich posted a blog yesterday about putting jobless young people to work cleaning up the mess in the Gulf and sending the bill to BP. Sure and there are a lot of other corporate messes that need to be cleaned up with the bills sent to the respective corporations. In addition to that there are tons of jobs being taken by people that aren't even citizens of the US. These jobs total about the same number as the unemployed in this country. So my solution is to force employers who employ illegals to hire jobless American citizens instead. Government would not have to pay the bill to employ these people, but it would have to facilitate their being employed. In Europe this is know as "workfare." In his book Europe's Promise, Steven Hill tells how workfare, not welfare, is the true nature of European societies. Governments do whatever it takes to get people into jobs paid for by the private sector.
In Sweden nationwide databases of jobs are provided by government at storefront employment agencies. Support systems assist people who are out of work to be sure, but the main goal is to place people in jobs, to get them back to work. Another way European societies create jobs is by public-private partnerships. There is much in the way of infrastructure that needs improving in the US, but the US is hampered in that government doesn't have the money, and private enterprise is not interested in improving infrastructure. This is where private-public partnerships could create not only improved infrastructure but also the jobs required to produce it. Steven Hill writes:
One of the most compelling stories of Europe's strategic use of public-private partnerships is the way it has utilized them for financing massive infrastructure projects, such as for trains and other forms of mass transit, ports, bridges, roads, and even broadband Internet availability. The rigid American way of thinking spurns government involvement in the private sector as well as private investment in public infrastructure, leaving it to the government to pay for and undertake most public infrastructure projects. This creates a major bottleneck when the government is running big deficits, resulting in the delay or outright canceling of crucial infrastructure investment. But European governments, not so hidebound by fundamentalist economic preaching, have played an active role in creating investment vehicles to attract hundreds of billions of dollars from private investors across the globe to finance local and national infrastructure development. They have created financing partnerships with foreign pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, financial institutions, insurance companies and other entities.
"Participants in Europe's infrastructure market marvel at how European national and municipal governments, generally considered to be less market friendly and more suspicious of the private sector than American government, could be so far ahead of the United States in using creative partnerships with the private sector and innovative capital market tools to raise vast sums for infrastructure projects," says Heidi Crebo-Rediker, an investment banker.
In other words government can leverage infrastructure projects instead of paying for them directly and, in the process, create jobs. Instead of decaying infrastructure with no way of paying to improve it, government leverages the creation not only of needed improvements to infrastructure but at the same time creates jobs that private enterprise, left to its own devices, would not create. Creative financing is one of the tools that make this possible. In the US the only model used is to spend government money on projects using taxes (or borrowed money) to pay for them. But there are other ways for government to raise money using the capital markets. Leveraging is the key word. The amount in royalties that BP and other oil companies now pay for extracting American resources could also be raised to European levels of around 50%. Right now, although a significant amount of money is raised by the US from royalties on oil and other resources, the rate is relatively paltry compared to European rates.
And for government to facilitate placing unemployed young American workers in jobs now taken by illegals would be a way to solve part of the illegal immigration problem and the unemployment problem at the same time. But it would take government "work" to bring this about. Funds would have to be used to set up an agency to bring this about; it wouldn't just happen by passing some law or decree. The rewards, as far as government is concerned, would be that people would be taken off the unemployment roles and this would save government money. So by putting out some money to facilitate this happening, government would save money in the long run. Other countries such as Canada will not let anyone into the country if they would be taking one job away from a Canadian citizen. They would have to prove that the job they would be doing could not be done by a Canadian. Otherwise, they do not get in.
The US, however, is so lame and lax both in border protection and job protection that it lets non-American citizens take jobs that Americans could be doing. And don't tell me that illegals are doing jobs Americans don't want to do. Americans should be given the choice of doing those jobs or having their unemployment benefits dropped. At the same time those jobs should come with all the benefits and protections that are not given to the illegals who do them such as paying at least minimum wage. These jobs should be dignified to the extent that they are jobs worthy of doing by American citizens.
While in the US job provision is almost entirely left to the private sector, in Europe governments are actively involved in leveraging job provision and protecting job markets. This is not the same as hiring more government workers. Private enterprise supplies and pays for the jobs. Government with its "workfare" philosophy does whatever it can to leverage them. Private enterprise in the US is obsessed with replacing American workers with low cost labor whether it be by hiring illegals or offshoring the jobs to low cost labor countries. The Obama administration should not just wait around for the private sector to provide jobs. The private sector is actively engaged in the process of reducing the number of American jobs and right now government policy encourages them to do so. Outsourcing, offshoring, automating, computerizing - these are all ways US corporations are bound and determined to reduce the amount of money thay pay for their labor input and hence increase profits. Left to their own devices US corporations will not create jobs when they are in the process of destroying jobs. Where this leaves the American worker is unemployed.
