There's all this talk about jobs in the stimulus bill, but very little thought into what it takes to do a job. Millions of Americans are out of work, and so the Democrats decide the best way to spend money is to give it to their political supporters and watch that money trickle down to the rest of us.
It would be funny if it weren't so painful.
So what are we to do? How about block grants to small businesses to hire? If we have to spend money (I'm not convinced of it), give it to small businesses and watch them create jobs. Here's an example. I need to hire employees to grow my business, but I'm not willing to take the risk of training people who may or may not work out when cash flow could bankrupt me. I contract out to part-time workers because the risk of hiring a full-time worker is too high.
Give me $80,000. I'll hire two employees, pay them well - pay their health insurance, and spend a year training them. My investment is lost time, but my potential reward is two employees who could help me grow my business. At the end of the year, if I've done my job, I can assume the full risk of employment, and I've just taken two people off the unemployment rolls and retrained them as skilled knowledge professionals. It's short-term, it's targeted, and it shifts the burden over to employers after the first year.
The emphasis would be on retraining workers who have lost jobs, so the grants would only be for small employers who hired unemployed workers. At the same time, President Obama could give a speech where he lifts up the spirit of the entrepreneurial small businessman, asking them to help out, but offering assistance with a direct grant as the government's part in this. Taxes would still be paid. Government would still get its piece, but in terms of jumpstarting the economy, it has to work better than giving tens of millions to Florissant for a Music Hall of Fame.
Will some of this money be wasted? Yes, but no more and probably less than we're seeing in the current stimulus bill. Paperwork is kept to a minimum, as the small businesses are responsible for hiring using their own processes - all we need is block grants and bureaucrats staying out of our way. To prevent fraud, money could be disbursed monthly after proof of W-2's has been filed, and the need to have a job one year out would push the employees to learn a skill.
Rates of pay could be established based on the work being done, but you can shoot for an average total compensation of $50,000 per job. You could make it a $300,000,000,000 one time expense, and you've just added 6,000,000 jobs to the economy in the first year, trained new workers (construction, mechanics, marketers, accounting), and you've actually done some good. It's not a perfect plan, and it only works if it's temporary (permanent government grants for employers is a very bad idea), forcing people to adjust quickly.
And you could write it up in about twenty pages, so even the overworked staffers in Senator McCaskill's office would have time to read it (Yesterday morning, I called McCaskill's office in D.C. and asked where she stood on the stimulus. The young man who answered said she was uncommitted. I asked him if she or anyone in the office had read it, and he replied "It's 600 pages!" Yesterday afternoon, she was out giving reasons to pass the bill, unread).
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