Who Creates Jobs?

         

During this political season, we are, or we should be, hearing a lot of discussion about jobs and job creation. From what discussion there has been, it is obvious that the politicos have begun to believe their own positions papers on this subject. This post is just to set the record straight, POLITICIANS DO NOT CREATE JOBS!

Yep, I said it, and I will probably never get asked to even run for Dog Catcher after this. But it's true. The only jobs that a Politician can create are those on his or her own staff and they don't have any positive economic impact.

Real meaningful and economically valuable jobs are created by businesses, and history and research shows us that small businesses create the majority of new jobs in our economy.

So why do the politico's on both sides of the aisle seem to be so hostile to the small business man and woman? Why do we have a tax system that punishes rather than encourages entrepreneurial efforts? Why do we let any organization grow so big it is "too big to fail?"

How we get to what politicians can be good for. You knew there was something, didn't you? Elected officials, politicians, can create and political, legal and regulatory climate that is fair, stable, easily understood and navigated, and that rewards business, particularly small businesses, that invest in technologies and people to increase the size of our labor market.

Right now, the job market is not growing, because the politicians are so full of double talk and double crossing that business men and women have no idea what to expect. Will credit be available or hard to find. Are we going to be forced to execute Sequestration and destroy the federal budget (and the economy with it) or will they find a way to avoid disaster?

Who knows? And that is just the point. With so much uncertainty, why would a sane man or woman take the risk of investing hundreds of thousands, let alone millions of dollars, to start or grow a business for markets that could dry up and blow away in just six months?

And what do we get from the politicians, Republican and Democrat alike, brinksmanship. Is it any wonder that Iran and North Korea continue to defy our attempts to rain in their nuclear programs? All they are doing is copying the behavior of our own political parties in repeatedly taking Us and Them to the brink of destruction, only to pull back at the last second. The only problem is one of these days, somebody is going to misjudge which second is that "last" one, and the consequences are going to be more than devastating. I'm not sure which scenarior (the domestic political one or the international political one) would be the worst to have happen first. Either way, the results won't be good for the US job market.