Jupiterimages/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) -- The U.S. may have a job shortage but there's no shortage of ideas, now, for how to create more jobs.
With 25 million people looking for work and the unemployment rate stuck at 9.1 percent, the economy can't recover until the job engine is restarted. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that there were only 3.1 million job openings in June. The number is far below the number at the beginning of the recession (4.4 million in December 2007) and has been flat since February 2011.
President Obama devoted a weekend address to the need to reduce unemployment. Jobs, too, will remain his topic on Thursday, when he travels to Holland, Michigan to inspect a Johnson Controls plant making advanced batteries -- an example, says the administration, of how jobs can be created by promoting green technology.
Though the president has said that deficit reduction must remain part of the country's economic strategy, he stressed in his weekend remarks that, "Our job right now has to be doing whatever we can to help folks find work; to help create the climate where a business can put up that job listing. We've got to rebuild this economy and the sense of security that middle class has felt slipping away for years."
Ideas the Obama administration has put forward include a new tax credit that would give companies a financial incentive to hire veterans returning from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; passage of free trade agreements now pending, which the president says would create jobs by boosting U.S. exports to Asia and South America; and putting unemployed construction workers back to work rebuilding America's roads, bridges, airports and other crumbling infrastructure.
His critics, however, maintain Obama's "new" ideas are anything but, and are faulting him for not implementing them yet. And the president himself took heat when he joked about his infrastructure plan's failure to create jobs. During a gathering of his Coucil on Jobs and Competitiveness in June, Obama joked, "Shovel ready jobs...was not so shovel ready."
Other job-creation schemes are circulating, some put forth by think-tanks and advocacy groups, others by unions, and still more from politicians of both parties. Seemingly small steps, say advocates, could yield significant job increases.
Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, argues that merely by expanding the federal research and development tax credit, some 162,000 new jobs could be created in the near term.
Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, advocates putting young people to work by expanding Americorps and by creating new job-corps modeled on those of the 1930s -- "the modern equivalent of the WPA [Works Progress Administration]." They would build or re-build parks, maintain wilderness areas and create public art.
Some of the most ambitious and wide-ranging ideas can be found in A Vision for Economic Renewal: An American Jobs Agenda. The plan is the handiwork of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, Reps. John Garamendi, D-Calif., and Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, and a task force co-chaired by Leo Hindery, Jr., chairman of the Economic Growth/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation. Hindery insists the 15-point plan, "a far-reaching prescription," would create "something north of 20 million jobs."
On that list, Hindery's top recommendation is the creation of a national Infrastructure Bank (an idea favored, too, by many other job-creation experts). The White House likes the idea of the bank. So do Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., who have authored legislation that would call it into being.
Its loans would reduce the risk faced by private investors wanting to put money into ambitious infrastructure projects, thereby ensuring that private money would be available.
Hindery tells ABC News he thinks such a bank affords the single best opportunity now to create lots of private sector jobs.
"Each $1 billion such a bank might lend could create 40,000 jobs," he says. With "fully $3 trillion worth" of U.S. infrastructure right now needing attention, many billions might be raised and loaned, many hundreds of thousands of jobs created.
Copyright 2011 ABC News Radio
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