The worst economic downturn since the Depression is behind us, but the great American job machine keeps sputtering. Four years into “recovery,” too many Americans are still unemployed, underemployed, on disability or out of the workforce altogether.
What are U.S. political leaders doing about the nation’s jobs emergency? Next to nothing. Instead, House Republicans have plunged Washington into another senseless round of fiscal brinksmanship, jeopardizing economic recovery in their Ahab-style quest to destroy the great white whale of Obamacare.
Imagine, instead, that we had a functioning political system. What could Congress and the White House do to goose the pace of job creation?
Instead of turning to the usual (partisan) experts and Beltway interest groups for answers, why not put that question directly to U.S. job creators themselves? That inspired suggestion comes from John Dearie of the Financial Services Roundtable and Courtney Geduldig of Standard & Poor, who hit the road two years ago to do exactly that.
They present the findings of this unique survey in a new book, Where the Jobs Are: Entrepreneurship and the Soul of the American Economy. It’s based on the authors’ intensive conversations with over 200 entrepreneurs who attended roundtables in 12 cities. What results is a concrete and practical blueprint for policy changes that can help entrepreneurs launch new businesses, expand existing ones and create the good “breadwinner” jobs that can support middle class families.
There are no blinding revelations here; most of their prescriptions are familiar to Washington policy hounds like me. But this only underscores that job creation isn’t some arcane branch of economics that only Nobel laureates can fathom. U.S. policymakers mostly know what to do – which makes their failure to act all the more tragic.
Continue reading at The Hill.
