Jeff Immelt is chairman and CEO of General Electric and chairman of the President’s Jobs and Competitiveness Council. Ken Chenault is the chairman and CEO of American Express and a member of the council. The two wrote a column in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on ways to create jobs.
The first proposal they made shows how complex the problem is:
“Train workers for today’s open jobs. There are more than 2 million jobs open in the United States, in part because employers can’t find workers with the advanced manufacturing skills they need. The public sector must quickly form partnerships with community colleges, vocational schools and others to match career training with real-world hiring needs.”
Great idea. Two problems. First, the need is now for jobs. Setting up programs to give potential workers “advanced manufacturing skills” will take months, probably years. Second, paying for those job-training courses and subsidizing the students who will take them would require substantial federal subsidies. It is more than naive to imagine that a Republican-controlled Congress will rush to borrow the money needed to fund a program that would reduce unemployment long term and help President Obama get re-elected, short term.
To make these observations is not to criticize Immelt and Chenault. It has long been known that U.S. industry is short on highly skilled workers. Taking steps to remedy that situation — however long it takes — deserves a high priority. One of the quick ways is to recruit workers from abroad who have the skills. Legislation providing immigration law waivers would be needed. Lawmakers would also need help in dealing with those who insist that jobs should be reserved for Americans and who oppose any watering down of immigration laws.
Conclusion: by all means, do it — but understand that it’s a long-term solution that will face determined opposition.
“Streamline permitting: Cut red tape so job-creating construction and infrastructure projects can move forward. The administration can take a few simple steps to streamline the process of obtaining permits, without undercutting the protections that our regular system provides.”
Another winner. But perhaps 50 copies should be made and sent to the states; and more thousands still sent to cities. Most construction permits are issued at the state or local level. If the federal government is standing in the way, Congress holds the key. If Uncle Sam is smothering infrastructure projects — such as creating a safe place to store nuclear waste, just to pick one out of the blue — then Congress should step up to the plate and go to work.
But as council members Immelt and Chenault surely know, politics rears its ugly head when federal projects are up for consideration. And politics stifles far more federal projects than bureaucratic red tape. They could do us all a favor by devoting a sizeable chunk of their report to a call for bipartisanship and non-partisanship and pointing out the outrageous price the nation pays every time Congress puts the next election ahead of the public good.
MR. OBAMA’S JOB council will do good work, make good suggestions and give the na-tion a solid program of job-creating work to do. It will not, however, give the nation a revolver loaded with silver bullets with which to slay unemployment. The world is fresh out of those rascals.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
