The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield. In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can.  The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money.  That’s a premise that should make the Democrats happy.

The problem for the Democrats is that the government hasn’t shown that they can earn a positive or even a break even return on their spending.  (Stunningly, bailouts excluded).

As the Republicans and Tea-Party will tell you, we have a spending problem.  The reality is that the problem isn’t how much we spend, it’s what we spend it on.  Our government is not very good at funding projects/investments that generate much if any return. Our government is so overhead laden that just to get the money from the Treasury to a project automatically starts it in a hole. Plus our federal government loves to hire people. That isn’t a problem in and of itself. The problem is that they over pay and let them keep their jobs forever. A basic tenet of business is that it is rarely a good idea to borrow short term funds for long term projects or employees unless you are damn sure of the returns. Our government never is.

So what to do ?

First we pick a goal. I want the goal to be employment. I want to help companies hire employees. I think the first problem to solve is creating jobs.


Individuals now have debt = to about 119pct of income vs historical levels  of .17pct in the 40s, 55pct in the 50s , 65pct in the 60s and a high of 133pct in 2007). It didn’t create enough jobs to have an impact and it won’t in this environment. They also think the same applied to  corporations will translate into more jobs. Nope. That is not the case. Big companies in particular are not cash poor. Whether its re-patriation of cash in foreign countries or lower tax rates, neither lead to the creation of new jobs in this economy.  It just leads to more cash in the bank.

So the Democrats are right, we should borrow more money. The Dems are wrong that the government knows how to spend the money. The Republicans/Tea Party are right that we have a spending problem. The Republicans/Tea Party are wrong that cutting taxes will result in more jobs.

So IMHO, creating  jobs isn’t about the government spending money on jobs /projects, nor is it about cutting taxes. It’s about taking a page from the technology and common sense world.



Seriously. Call me crazy (and Im sure many of you will), but there is no reason why we can’t quickly create a federal website that allows existing companies to say to the Federal Government how much money they need and how many jobs they can create for that money and for what duration are they committing to maintain those jobs for the money.


I’m sure I have pissed off everyone who doesn’t qualify. Sorry.

The reality is that for this to work the universe of companies has to be small enough so that the system put in place is not overwhelmed. The companies must be big enough to be able to respond to any required due diligence information.  If this is made to work, the qualifications could be reduced to expand the universe of eligible companies.

Who would be the decision makers ? I would set up multiple 5 person regional committees across the country.  I’m not quite sure who would pick the members, but I can tell you what I would set as a requirement. People would only be eligible to be on the committee if they had not made a political contribution of any kind directly to a politician or to a PAC of any sort in the last 5 years.  This can not be a politically dominated decision process.

I know this is just a rough idea, but I wanted to put it out there for consideration. Rather than having Dems and Republicans fight ideological battles about job creation, lets get direct. Lets just ask companies to tell us how many jobs they would create and how much they need and see what it all adds up to and go from there

What do you think ?


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