In\u00a0 a prior post, I mentioned that Obama’s favorite courtier<\/del> CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, was part of a Jobs & Competitiveness Council, ostensibly tasked with finding ways to put Americans to work.\u00a0 It’s the kind of thing that government always says it’s doing, anyway.\u00a0 After all, we have a Commerce Department, a Labor Department, an Education Department, and dozens, if not hundreds, of bureaus, agencies, subalterns, and fiefdoms devoted exclusively to this problem.<\/p>\n

From the bureaucracy’s point of view, they’ve spent decades of time, billions of taxpayer dollars, and millions in campaign contributions to get where they are, and they’re not going to let a hand-picked set of toadies show them up.\u00a0 The beauty of it is that either their success or their failure shows that our actual redundant population lives and works within 10 miles of the Capitol.<\/p>\n

If by now anyone at all has any faith left in this kind of commission, it should be put to rest by its initial recommendations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The council’s recommendations are necessarily bad in themselves, but like most initiatives of this kind, the steps can be classified into the Worthwhile, the Overdue, the Unnecessary, the Undoing of Our Mistakes, and the Too Little To Be Taken Seriously, and the Payoff.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Streamline permitting<\/em>. Cut red tape so job-creating\u00a0 construction and infrastructure projects can move forward. The\u00a0 administration can take a few simple steps to streamline the process of\u00a0 obtaining permits, without undercutting the protections that our\u00a0 regulatory system provides.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Been there, done that.\u00a0 It’s of a piece with “remove unnecessary regulation.”\u00a0 If this one moves as fast as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs<\/a>, those projects should be shovel-ready just about the time the workers being born today are ready to retire.\u00a0 Which, given the state of our pensions and Social Security, is likely to be, never.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Boost jobs in travel and tourism<\/em>. This industry is one of America’s largest employers, but the U.S. has\u00a0 lost significant market share. By making it easier to visit the U.S.\u00a0 through improved visa processes, we can win back market share in travel\u00a0 and tourism and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can we, really?\u00a0 And if we can, do we really want to?\u00a0 I’ve no doubt that the State Department gets many more visa applications than it fills.\u00a0 A friend of mine who used to work in the Administrative Cone<\/a> told me that in language training, the first phrase they learned was, “I’m very sorry, but I cannot give you a visa.”\u00a0 (Lo ciento much, pero no puedo darle una visa.\u00a0 Oh, the irony.)<\/p>\n

I’m all for tourists, as long as the ones that read those little squiggles from right to left actually go home when their visas expire.\u00a0 I grew up in DC, and the place was pretty cosmopolitan by the time I left, and packed with tourists, domestic and foreign, from June through September.\u00a0\u00a0 So, zip it, “Progressives,” this isn’t about xenophobia.<\/p>\n

But tourism jobs aren’t always well-paying, they tend to go away when some other place becomes the hot destination, and they usually require infrastructure improvements and tour guide training to stay competitive.\u00a0 It’s not as simple as opening up the visa process.\u00a0 People have already made travel plans, and the idea that suddenly this summer, millions of foreign nationals are going to buy plane tickets to the US in time to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, is absurd.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Facilitate small-business loans<\/em>.\u00a0 Help small-business\u00a0 owners obtain the information and support they need to access Small\u00a0 Business Administration funding. At Jobs Council town halls in Dayton\u00a0 and Minneapolis, small-business owners expressed frustration about the\u00a0 challenges in obtaining financing and assistance. We must move quickly\u00a0 to allow easier access to SBA funding. SBA Administrator Karen Mills is\u00a0 already tackling this challenge, and the administration should\u00a0 accelerate and prioritize these efforts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Again, why?\u00a0 Look, I get that small businesses are having a hard time borrowing.\u00a0 But isn’t this the sort of Social-Policy-Over-Credit-Risk engineering that had the entire Sun Belt in a housing crisis two years ago?\u00a0 We all know why businesses aren’t hiring: they don’t know the costs of new employees, and those costs they do know are too high.\u00a0 Banks are afraid to lend because of credit risk, inflation risk, economic risk, and higher reserve requirements.\u00a0 Companies – large companies – are sitting on cash because they don’t see growth opportunities, so it’s not as though Scrooge McDuck is the only one making this judgment.\u00a0 Subsidizing and backstopping more bad loans not only won’t solve this problem, it’ll set us up for the next one.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Put construction workers back to work<\/em>. More than two\u00a0 million construction workers don’t have work. Every city in America has\u00a0 commercial buildings that can be made more energy efficient. Both the\u00a0 private and public sectors can step up to create good jobs and save\u00a0 energy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Uh, what happened to all those shovels?\u00a0 Fresh from not building or repairing bridges, roads, and other critical infrastructure, American workers will have the opportunity to not make building more efficient.<\/p>\n

This one’s even more sinister than it appears, since it’s naked crony capitalism.\u00a0 It’s the payoff to Jeff Immelt for being Obama’s favorite CEO.\u00a0 GE has investing billions in lobbying to swing government “investment” in its own green technologies.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Train workers for today’s open jobs<\/em>.\u00a0 There are more than\u00a0 two million open jobs in the U.S., in part because employers can’t find\u00a0 workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need. The private\u00a0 sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges,\u00a0 vocational schools and others to match career training with real-world\u00a0 hiring needs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This one looks like the Worthwhile, but it reality, it’s probably the Unnecessary.\u00a0 It’s one case where the Council has identified a couple of real problems – the agency problem and asymmetrical information – but there’s no chance that this is a jump-start for jobs.<\/p>\n

Students are willing to learn the skills it takes to get a job.\u00a0 They are willing to go into massive, unshakable debt to get four-year degrees that may never earn them a dime.\u00a0 Denver has, oh probably about a dozen, trade and vocational schools whose sole purpose is to train people for exciting careers as a medical technician, for instance.<\/p>\n

The job of the schools is to get students paying tuition, and the student probably has a terrible time knowing if the school is going to actually impart the skills he needs to earn enough to pay back his loans.\u00a0 In an economy where nobody’s hiring, recent employment and salary records may not be much help.<\/p>\n

Obviously, this is appealing to both the government and to Mr. Immelt because of the immense opportunities for graft.\u00a0 But, as they like to say on the campaign trail, there is a better way.<\/p>\n

Why not have an accreditation program, run by the hiring industries, that serves the same purpose as UL<\/a> does for roof deck panels<\/a>?\u00a0 It’s completely in the companies’ interest to do this, since they’re the ones looking for trained labor.\u00a0 They’re the ones who know what skills they need.\u00a0 Sure, there will be compromises, but we all know it’s a lifetime of on-the-job training out there, anyway.<\/p>\n

The other part, the part that this administration, even Arne Duncan, will never embrace, is for the high schools to join in the fund, and allow some of the kids’ appropriations money to follow them to these schools in their junior and senior years.<\/p>\n

As with all the other fast-track initiatives on the list, this won’t produce any actual trained workers for at least six months, more likely a year.\u00a0 And all the trained workers of the world won’t help business if the government has made it too expensive to hire any of them.
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