Blinder Ways to Add Jobs

How Washington Can Create Jobs (by Alan Blinder)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703683804574533843234723498.html?mod=djemITP#articleTabs%3Darticle

What is missing from Prof. Blinder's discussion and the other general jobs discussions? Can we say 'business-friendly' policies?

We hear about a health overhaul, which is designed to find a way to get more money into a health system that is supporting the costs of basically medicare and medicaid (the red herring of bringing the currently uninsured in is basically a money grab for young people who have fewer claims and aren't paying the huge premium costs).

As for supporting business through saner tax policies - let's admit that the administration never saw a taxable dollar from someone with money that they couldn't find a worthy recipient of a government program for!

There does seem to be an implicit admission that we need to find private sector jobs - so, where are the questions about why the jobs aren't forthcoming? My guess is the answers are so strident and obvious and obviously going to gore some constituency or another of both parties that they'd like to avoid the facts and go with the fiction.

It's all nice to think of minimum wages and blaming the Chinese, but we spend too much on consumption in this country - in particular, on the consumption of government services, mandated benefits - and the fact that we don't want to allow wages to reflect the actual value added of the work being performed (the old labor conundrum comes in here - whereby so much is taken out of the salary that could be paid to the worker by the employer that the worker is left with too little net purchasing power - i.e. it costs the employer $300 per day for the worker but the worker goes home with only a $100. Where did the rest go? Government programs.).

Let's get back to letting people know and choose what benefits they are paying for, etc., etc., etc.