President Barack Obama has shown he is serious about wanting to find ways to create jobs, this time by recruiting an impressive roster of corporate and union executives to serve as nonpartisan advisers on the new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Members include top executives from General Electric, Xerox, American Express, Citigroup, Boeing, Intel, Facebook, Comcast and Eastman Kodak to name a few, along with leaders of the AFL-CIO and United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.
At the council’s inaugural meeting Thursday in Washington, Obama set the tone by stating that although the economy is beginning to grow, unemployment remains too high.
As Obama said: “It’s critical for us to have input from folks who are actually hiring, putting people to work, making payroll, making the products and services that make our economy so powerful.”
For the council to succeed, it should be willing to consider input not only from corporate and union leaders, but also from small businesses that create most of the nation’s jobs, individuals who are struggling to find employment and educators who are needed to help train America’s workforce.
The council should be the ideal forum to examine why jobs aren’t being created quickly enough. Theories abound, including the unwillingness of corporations to invest the cash they have on hand, the transfer of jobs overseas, and the struggles that businesses have attempting to secure loans from banks. Any barriers to job growth should be identified and rectified.
The examination should include a review of current or potential trade agreements with other countries to determine whether they help or hinder job growth. Emphasis should be placed on ways to invest in education to help produce a better-trained workforce ready to compete in the 21st century.
Obama aptly said he doesn’t want the U.S. economy to be one that is “simply buying from other people and borrowing to do it. I want us to be selling to other people and having some other folks owe us some money.”
One obvious way to create jobs is for the country to invest more in the construction or upgrade of highways, bridges, dams, schools, airports and other infrastructure. Nevada and the other states have numerous proposed infrastructure projects that are worthy of consideration. The council should put its expertise to use by helping the Obama administration devise a strategy to prioritize these projects to maximize the number of jobs created.
There is a tendency to believe that a presidential council or commission report will simply collect dust in a library. But job creation is too important an issue to be cast aside.
We hope that the recommendations the council makes are taken seriously enough by elected officials that they are dealt with in a spirit of bipartisanship. The American public is tired of the economic conditions that have led to high unemployment and wants solutions that will produce jobs.
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