November 22, 2009
Fix unemployment, fix the economy
We have two problems in this country that are keeping our jobs numbers depressed. There is work we need done, with no money to pay for it, and there are paying jobs with no one trained to work them.
The first part of this problem should have been fixed by the stimulus bill, but unfortunately, the places that needed the most work rarely had any shovel-ready projects of the sort that the stimulus was designed to pay for. Many of these places are simply too poor, and didn't expect any money before the stimulus was announced, so the environmental impact studies and engineering designs that have to take place before any actual construction simply weren't done in time to benefit from the money once it was available.
There is still a large amount of stimulus money that hasn't been spent. I think we need to change the guidelines of the stimulus in order to send money to localities that agree to fast-track the process of converting a decrepit road, bridge, tunnel, water treatment plant etc. into a "shovel-ready project". Even so, it means that the jobs to actually do that work won't materialize for a year or more, but I don't see this as a bad thing.
The crews working on projects right now can count on a second wave of jobs starting up right around the time the ones they're working on now begin winding down. With the current stimulus bill, they're all just praying that the economy will recover enough that there will be someone to pay for their work once their projects are finished. More important to the rest of us, the infrastructure with the most desperate needs for repairs might actually get it.
The other problem is more nuanced. There are jobs out there that our workforce simply isn't prepared to do. We have a critical shortage of pharmacists, nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and other positions that require lots of training. But we can meet this challenge by providing companies with tax credits to put recent college graduates through the extra training that they need in order to fill those positions, as well as providing extended unemployment benefits and low-interest loans for unemployed people to go back to school.
In most states, people who lose their jobs and go back to school lose their unemployment benefits, making it very hard for people to be re-trained into the careers that are still hiring even in this economy. And college graduates who aren't equipped to immediately do a job that requires specialized training and experience simply can't get hired into anything other than the sorts of jobs that require no training. We're at risk of these well-educated and potentially valuable employees losing any benefit from their undergraduate training through lack of use. Not many people can still do calculus after 4 years of working retail.
To pay for it, I think we need to redefine the TARP bill. Use the money paid back from banks to fund federal education loans, and use the profit from repaid TARP loans to provide tax credits to companies that hire and train college graduates. I don't think we can overstate what a terrible waste it would be for these people, who have taken on massive personal debt in order to get some of the training they need, to see their training languish through years of disuse while the economy slowly recovers. Any money we spend on helping these people get into the highly specialized jobs we desperately need people to do (as opposed to simply importing highly trained people from overseas) is going to come back to us ten-fold over the course of their working lives.