President Obama says he’s 100 percent focused on creating jobs these days, so why is taking advice from a bunch of CEOs whose companies have shed thousands of jobs over the last decade?
Investor’s Business Daily has the highlights:
• GE’s domestic workforce shrank by 25,000 — almost 16% — between 2001 and 2010, according to the company’s annual reports. (The number of overseas GE jobs climbed over those years.)
• AmEx employed 28% fewer workers in 2010 than it did a decade ago.
• Kodak’s workforce cratered to just 18,800 last year from 75,000 in 2001.
• Xerox’s employee base shrank by nearly a third between 2001 and 2009, before it acquired Affiliated Computer Services and its 74,000 workers in 2010.
• Even Intel has trimmed the number of workers it employs over the past decade.
What’s more interesting than who is on the President’s jobs council is who isn’t… There isn’t one representative of from America’s small and mid-sized businesses, who are responsible for creating two-thirds of the nation’s new jobs.
It’s pure symbolism over substance, that simply highlights the incestuous relationship between big business and government… It’s little surprise, and of little comfort, that council’s list of must-do, job-creating ideas includes the same tired old big government ideas that get trotted every time the economy slows: More money to retrain workers, more tax dollars retrofitting commercial buildings to boost energy efficiency and more government loans passed out by the Small Business Administration.
If the President was truly serious about job creation he’d do the simplest most effective thing available: Get government out of the way. Businesses in are drowning in sea of taxes, and regulation that are choking off job growth. The President’s Jobs Council did at least pay lips service to all the job-choking red tape by calling on the administration to streamline permitting processes.
But they mad no mention of much need reforms, like an immediate cut in corporate and capital gains taxes… The Wall Street Journal examined the need for corporate tax reform last December is story highlighting how the our ‘temporary’ tax code puts the nation in a lasting bind.
Related
- 1.9 Million Fewer Americans Have Jobs Today Than When Obama Signed Stimulus – CNSNews.com
- Don’t Look Now, But Stagflation May Be Here – Fox Business
- A Welfare State or a Start-Up Nation? – Allan Meltzer, Wall Street Journal
- US inflation rise ties Fed’s hands on further easing – Financial Times
- Lack of Retirement Funds Is Americans’ Biggest Financial Worry – Gallup
- Is Carter A Best Case Scenario? – W.R. Mead, The American Interest
- In Boeing Case, Machinists Are Picking the Wrong Fight – Bloomberg.com
- Federal Reserve Bank Presidents: Washington is Killing Business – Heritage Foundation
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