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HappySqurriel on 04 August 2011
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richardhutnik said:
HappySqurriel said:
Creating jobs is easy, fixing the economy so that good jobs are created is more challenging ...

If you simply eliminated all forms of government welfare (including personal and corporate welfare), returned to a small but effective regulatory system while drastically reducing bureaucracy, drastically cut taxes while simplifying the tax code, and eliminated the minimum wage 10 million jobs would appear overnight. Most of these jobs would be created by individuals and businesses that were "exploiting" people who had limited options because they were suddenly very affordable labor, and most of the people with limited options would tolerate these jobs because the threat of starvation is a powerful motivator to settle.

Now, being that in an environment like this new jobs would be created at a rate far faster than population growth this "exploitation" would actually be fairly short lived and few people would be working for a wage that was lower than the current minimum wage.

In order to create good jobs you need to create an environment where investment is going into making employees more productive and/or to develop new knowledge based industries. This requires freeing up investment capital that is currently allocated towards government debt (by paying down government debt) and consumer debt (by reducing total consumer debt).

Assuming of course a business actually needs people.  That is a kicker.  A business would even be iffy to employ people for free.  You could run stuff like in Mexico where people bag tips for groceries, but if there isn't demand there for more labor, then it isn't going to happen.  Try walking into some store and offer them help, and they will say no.  This doesn't discount that Gamestop would likely employ fanboys for free, if they could get away with it.  But, you see a bum on the street come up and start do your windshield, do you accept that or find it a problem?  And then, there is a need to factor in specialization of labor in some areas, where you can't just employ everyone.  Businesses also can turn down some technology due to labor reasons.  I know one business that refused to switch over to S.A.P out of fear that they couldn't keep workers.  And in the area of IT, the skills needed have gotten far more diverse, and at the same time, they are demanding people have am absurd mix of skills, just for a 3 month contract.  

This video goes into symptoms of this today:

http://money.cnn.com/video/news/2011/08/04/n_big_business_jobs_cash.cnnmoney/

Over $1.5 trillion sitting in the reserves of large companies, not circulating or doing anything, nor being used to hire.  Business won't do anything, unless it sees it is necessary.


I make no assumptions that corporations will be the ones who create these jobs ...

I know there are countless jobs that individuals do on a daily/weekly basis that they would gladly pay someone else to do if they could afford to, and if the artificial pay-floor created by welfare and minimum wage was removed individuals who didn't have a job or decent prospects for a job would probably be willing to work for the amount of money these people were willing to pay. As an example, for $5 per hour (probably) 75% of people in North America would be willing to pay someone else to do their house cleaning for them, but if people can earn more than that sitting at home there is no incentive for them to take this housecleaning job.