President Obama’s “jobs” speech failed to deliver truly new ideas, just a rehash of old ones — temporary, targeted tax cuts plus nearly half a trillion dollars in new stimulus spending on infrastructure and public works — that have failed for him before.
Happily, it’s not too late to change. If he’s willing to get serious, he can act on a number of initiatives that could immediately create jobs and have a ripple effect throughout the economy.
* Support the Freedom to Invest Act of 2011 (HR 1834), which allows US multinationals to bring home some of the $1.2 trillion in cash earned overseas. They’re now hoarding the funds offshore to avoid the onerous US corporate taxes (on top of taxes already paid in the country where the profits were earned). Why not allow those funds to be repatriated at greatly reduced tax rates, provided the money is invested in jobs, plants and equipment in the United States?
* Persuade his appointees at the National Labor Relations Board to fast-track the hearings and decision-making that would allow Boeing to open its 787 Dreamliner assembly plant in South Carolina, provided the company demonstrates that union jobs in its home state of Washington are unaffected. After all, if it’s not illegal for Boeing to open a plant overseas, why shouldn’t it be able to open a plant anywhere it wants in the US?
* Direct his Interior Department to cut through the red tape and renew the permit granted to ExxonMobil to develop the largest oil discovery in a decade, located in the Julia field in the Gulf of Mexico. Exploiting that find — a deep reservoir of some 1 billion barrels of oil — would reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil and create thousands of jobs.
According to the American Petroleum Institute, by 2013 the ripple effects of this discovery and the lifting of the drilling moratorium imposed after the BP oil spill would cause “total employment supported by the Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas industry to [approach] 430,000 jobs, or a 77 percent increase.”
* Tap the third-largest proven oil reserve in the world, located in Alberta, Canada. US companies are eager to turn this resource into American jobs.
These oil sands are now technologically and economically viable — provided the heavy crude oil can be transported by a new pipeline to refineries on the Texas Gulf coast.
Since 80 percent of the 1,660-mile pipeline would be in the United States, it would put tens of thousands of people to work in construction and manufacturing. Most of the planning and permitting for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline has been done.
The major hold-up now is President Obama himself. He needs to approve the project and shepherd it through final State Department formalities.
Obama’s jobs initiatives to date have relied on stimulus spending of public funds — money that is largely borrowed. The debt ceiling debate and S&P downgrade shocked the nation into facing the fact that we must reduce the trajectory of borrowing and spending. But private-sector job creation is largely self-funding — and it provides a return on investment, which in turn generates new tax revenues.
Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. We don’t need more of the same Keynesian government investment that has failed time and again. We need fresh leadership and action that puts people to work in real jobs.
Scott S. Powell is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a managing partner at RemingtonRand LLC.