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.
