TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN PROMISES (ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION)

"You look at our Borders, they're like Swiss cheese."
Donald J. Trump, 2016


TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN PROMISES (ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION):

HE FOCUSES ON PROTECTING AMERICA'S BORDERS.

CRITICIZES GENERAL MOTORS FOR MANUFACTURING CARS IN MEXICO.

PLEASE PRAY FOR ALL U.S. MILITARY TROOPS & VETS.


Sources: DonaldTrump.com, CNBC, Fox News, Reuters, Youtube



***** Donald J. Trump’s 10 Point Plan to Put America First


1. Begin working on an impenetrable physical wall on the southern border, on day one. Mexico will pay for the wall.

2. End catch-and-release. Under a Trump administration, anyone who illegally crosses the border will be detained until they are removed out of our country.

3. Move criminal aliens out day one, in joint operations with local, state, and federal law enforcement. We will terminate the Obama administration’s deadly, non-enforcement policies that allow thousands of criminal aliens to freely roam our streets.

4. End sanctuary cities.

5. Immediately terminate President Obama’s two illegal executive amnesties. All immigration laws will be enforced - we will triple the number of ICE agents. Anyone who enters the U.S. illegally is subject to deportation. That is what it means to have laws and to have a country.

6. Suspend the issuance of visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur, until proven and effective vetting mechanisms can be put into place.

7. Ensure that other countries take their people back when we order them deported.

8. Ensure that a biometric entry-exit visa tracking system is fully implemented at all land, air, and sea ports.

9. Turn off the jobs and benefits magnet. Many immigrants come to the U.S. illegally in search of jobs, even though federal law prohibits the employment of illegal immigrants.

10. Reform legal immigration to serve the best interests of America and its workers, keeping immigration levels within historic norms.

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**** Trump team seeks agency records on border barriers, surveillance

In a wide-ranging request for documents and analysis, President-elect Donald Trump's transition team asked the Department of Homeland Security last month to assess all assets available for border wall and barrier construction.

The team also asked about the department's capacity for expanding immigrant detention and about an aerial surveillance program that was scaled back by the Obama administration but remains popular with immigration hardliners. And it asked whether federal workers have altered biographic information kept by the department about immigrants out of concern for their civil liberties.

The requests were made in a Dec. 5 meeting between Trump's transition team and Department of Homeland Security officials, according to an internal agency memo reviewed by Reuters. The document offers a glimpse into the president-elect's strategy for securing the U.S. borders and reversing polices put in place by the Obama administration.

Trump's transition team did not comment in response to Reuters inquiries. A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection declined to comment.

In response to the transition team request, U.S. Customs and Border Protection staffers identified more than 400 miles along the U.S.-Mexico border, and about the same distance along the U.S.-Canada border, where new fencing could be erected, according to a document seen by Reuters.

Reuters could not determine whether the Trump team is considering a northern border barrier. During the campaign, Trump pledged to build a wall and expand fencing on parts of the U.S.-Mexico border but said he sees no need to build a wall on the border with Canada.

One program the transition team asked about, according to the email summary, was Operation Phalanx, an aerial surveillance program that authorizes 1,200 Army National Guard airmen to monitor the southern border for drug trafficking and illegal migration.

The program once deployed 6,000 airmen under President George W. Bush but was downsized by Barack Obama, a move blasted by some conservatives who argue the surveillance is vital to border security.

POLICY SHIFT

The transition team also asked for copies of every executive order and directive sent to immigration agents since Obama took office in 2009, according to the memo summarizing the meeting.

Trump has said he intends to undo Obama's executive actions on immigration, including a 2012 order to allow children brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents to remain in the country on temporary authorizations that allow them to attend college and work.

The program, known as DACA, collected information including participants' addresses that could theoretically be used to locate and deport them if the policy is reversed. Another request of the transition team was for information about whether any migrant records have been changed for any reason, including for civil rights or civil liberties concerns, according to the internal memo seen by Reuters.

TRUMP'S FREE TRADE SPEECH REMINDS VOTERS ITS ALL ABOUT THE ECONOMY (STUPID)

TRUMP'S FREE TRADE SPEECH REMINDS USA ITS ALL ABOUT THE ECONOMY 

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE ECONOMY STUPID.

Sources: Reuters, CNN, TIME, YouTube

Video Highlights: 

2016 Presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump's FREE TRADE SPEECH delivered 6-30-2016 in New Hampshire was very encouraging and really made Trump appear as an Intelligent leader.

His speech was strongly focused on renegotiating current Free Trade agreements and bringing American jobs back from overseas.

Without more jobs there will be no MIDDLE CLASS within the American workforce.

**** Trump vows to reopen, or toss, NAFTA pact with Canada and Mexico

(Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Tuesday vowed to force Canada and Mexico to renegotiate the NAFTA trade agreement with the United States if elected, as part of an effort to protect and restore American jobs.

Trump criticized the North American Free Trade Agreement as a U.S. job killer, saying he would be willing to scrap the pact if Canada and Mexico were unwilling to budge. He also tried to link Democratic rival Hillary Clinton to the deal on the eve of a meeting in Ottawa of the "three amigos," the leaders of the three NAFTA signatories: the United States, Mexico and Canada. 

In his most detailed speech on trade, the presumptive Republican nominee said he would pull the United States out of negotiations for a deal among 12 Pacific Rim nations and promised to use executive power to resolve trade disputes with China.

Trump also pledged to revive the U.S. steel and aluminum industry, speaking at an aluminum scrap company in Monessen, Pennsylvania, nearly 30 miles (50 km) south of Pittsburgh, the one-time American steelmaking capital.

Trump has identified Pennsylvania as a state he believes he can wrest from the Democrats in the Nov. 8 election. He also campaigned on Tuesday in Ohio, which like Pennsylvania is a Rust Belt state. 

Democratic President Barack Obama won both states in 2008 and 2012, but manufacturing job losses have led to voter anxiety in the region.

"I'm going tell our NAFTA partners that I intend to immediately renegotiate the terms of that agreement to get a better deal for our workers. And I don't mean just a little bit better, I mean a lot better," Trump said in Pennsylvania.

If Canada and Mexico do not agree to renegotiate the pact, Trump said he would notify them under the agreement's terms "that America intends to withdraw from the deal."

He tried to tie his Democratic rival to the pact, approved in 1993 during the administration of her husband, President Bill Clinton, as he called NAFTA one of the "worst legacies" of the Clinton years.

On MSNBC after Trump's speech, Clinton spokeswoman Kristina Schake called the wealthy New York businessman the "king of outsourcing," in an apparent reference to Trump-branded products such as suits and ties made overseas. 

"It was full of hypocrisy and misstatements and outright lies," Schake said.

Trade has been a vulnerability for Clinton, who struggled for white, blue-collar votes in her Democratic primary race against U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who criticized her for supporting trade deals and said she was too close to Wall Street. 

TRANS-PACIFIC PARTNERSHIP

Trump echoed Sanders' criticism on Tuesday, saying Clinton supported the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, while she was secretary of state and only opposed it once she was running for president. Clinton's campaign said she opposed the agreement because it was not strong enough on currency manipulation and other areas. 

Clinton has said she will evaluate each trade deal on its merits but does not believe the TPP is good for U.S. workers. Sanders now says he will vote for Clinton in November, although he has not formally withdrawn from the race.

Trump said he saw no way to fix the TPP, calling it a "death blow" for American manufacturing. Although China is not part of the agreement, Trump said Beijing might try to enter it "through the back door" later on.

Later, during a rally in St. Clairsville, Ohio, Trump said the deal was "just a continuing rape of our country."

Just hours before Trump spoke, Clinton allies sought to pre-empt the planned trade speech by saying Trump's policies amounted to empty promises.

Earlier, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told a trade conference in Washington that "Trump embodies everything that is wrong with our current trade policy. He has consistently sent American jobs overseas to line his own pockets."

The AFL-CIO, which collectively represents more than 12 million workers, making it the largest U.S. labor federation, endorsed Clinton this month.

POPULIST ANGER

Both Clinton and Trump have acknowledged that Britain's vote to leave the European Union signaled a global economic frustration among working-class voters that could reverberate in the U.S. election.

"There is a lot of legitimate anxiety, fear and even anger in many parts of our country because people feel like the economy has failed them," Clinton said in Denver on Tuesday. "I think this is going to be one of the defining issues in this election."

Trump has seized on the historic Brexit vote to bolster his argument that voters are rising up against establishment leaders, saying Americans would reject the "global elite" and support his presidential candidacy.

But Trump has broken with Republican Party orthodoxy in criticizing trade deals, and has threatened to slap tariffs on Mexican and Chinese imports. His rhetoric has drawn criticism from many economists, who say such practices could spark trade wars.

As Trump spoke, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is usually in sync with prominent Republicans on trade policy, said on Twitter: "Under Trump's trade plans, we would see higher prices, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy."

"Outsourcing Pioneer!" Mitt Romney Invested Heavily In Companies That Outsourced American Manufacturing Jobs!

That's Right! Mitt Romney was responsible for the Outsourcing American Jobs trend by large Corporations.





Romney’s Bain Capital invested in companies that moved jobs overseas

Mitt Romney’s financial company, Bain Capital, invested in a series of firms that specialized in relocating jobs done by American workers to new facilities in low-wage countries like China and India.

During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

While economists debate whether the massive outsourcing of American jobs over the last generation was inevitable, Romney in recent months has lamented the toll it’s taken on the U.S. economy. He has repeatedly pledged he would protect American employment by getting tough on China.

“They’ve been able to put American businesses out of business and kill American jobs,” he told workers at a Toledo fence factory in February. “If I’m president of the United States, that’s going to end.”

Speaking at a metalworking factory in Cincinnati last week, Romney cited his experience as a businessman, saying he knows what it would take to bring employers back to the United States. “For me it’s all about good jobs for the American people and a bright and prosperous future,” he said.

For years, Romney’s political opponents have tried to tie him to the practice of outsourcing American jobs. These political attacks have often focused on Bain’s involvement in specific business deals that resulted in job losses.

But a Washington Post examination of securities filings shows the extent of Bain’s investment in firms that specialized in helping other companies move or expand operations overseas. While Bain was not the largest player in the outsourcing field, the private equity firm was involved early on, at a time when the departure of jobs from the United States was beginning to accelerate and new companies were emerging as handmaidens to this outflow of employment.

Bain played several roles in helping these outsourcing companies, such as investing venture capital so they could grow and providing management and strategic business advice as they navigated this rapidly developing field.

Over the past two decades, American companies have dramatically expanded their overseas operations and supply networks, especially in Asia, while shrinking their workforces at home. McKinsey Global Institute estimated in 2006 that $18.4 billion in global information technology work and $11.4 billion in business-process services have been moved abroad.

While the export of jobs has been disruptive for many workers and communities in the United States, outsourcing has been a powerful economic force. It has often helped lower the prices that American consumers pay for products and created a global supply chain that has made U.S. companies more nimble and profitable.

Romney campaign officials repeatedly declined requests to comment on Bain’s record of investing in outsourcing firms during the Romney era. Campaign officials have said it is unfair to criticize Romney for investments made by Bain after he left the firm but did not address those made on his watch.

In response to detailed questions about outsourcing investments, Bain spokesman Alex Stanton said, “Bain Capital’s business model has always been to build great companies and improve their operations.

We have helped the 350 companies in which we have invested, which include over 100 start-up businesses, produce $80 billion of revenue growth in the United States while growing their revenues well over twice as fast as both the S&P and the U.S. economy over the last 28 years.”

Until Romney left Bain Capital in 1999, he ran it with a proprietor’s zeal and attention to detail, earning a reputation for smart, hands-on management.

Bain’s foray into outsourcing began in 1993 when the private equity firm took a stake in Corporate Software Inc., or CSI, after helping to finance a $93 million buyout of the firm. CSI, which catered to technology companies like Microsoft, provided a range of services including outsourcing of customer support. Initially, CSI employed U.S. workers to provide these services but by the mid-1990s was setting up call centers outside the country.

Two years after Bain invested in the firm, CSI merged with another enterprise to form a new company called Stream International Inc. Stream immediately became active in the growing field of overseas calls centers. Bain was initially a minority shareholder in Stream and was active in running the company, providing “general executive and management services,” according to SEC filings.

By 1997, Stream was running three tech-support call centers in Europe and was part of a call center joint venture in Japan, an SEC filing shows. “The Company believes that the trend toward outsourcing technical support occurring in the U.S. is also occurring in international markets,” the SEC filing said.

Stream continued to expand its overseas call centers. And Bain’s role also grew with time. It ultimately became the majority shareholder in Stream in 1999 several months after Romney left Bain to run the Salt Lake City Olympics.

Bain sold its stake in Stream in 2001, after the company further expanded its call center operations across Europe and Asia.

The corporate merger that created Stream also gave birth to another, related business known as Modus Media Inc., which specialized in helping companies outsource their manufacturing. Modus Media was a subsidiary of Stream that became an independent company in early 1998. Bain was the largest shareholder, SEC filings show.

Modus Media grew rapidly. In December 1997, it announced it had contracted with Microsoft to produce software and training products at a center in Australia. Modus Media said it was already serving Microsoft from Asian locations in Singapore, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan and in Europe and the United States.

Two years later, Modus Media told the SEC it was performing outsource packaging and hardware assembly for IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Computer Corp. The filing disclosed that Modus had operations on four continents, including Asian facilities in Singapore, Taiwan, China and South Korea, and European facilities in Ireland and France, and a center in Australia.

“Technology companies, in particular, have increasingly sought to outsource the business processes involved in their supply chains,” the filing said. “. . . We offer a range of services that provide our clients with a one-stop shop for their outsource requirements.”

According to a news release issued by Modus Media in 1997, its expansion of outsourcing services took place in close consultation with Bain. Terry Leahy, Modus’s chairman and chief executive, was quoted in the release as saying he would be “working closely with Bain on strategic expansion.” At the time, three Bain directors sat on the corporate board of Modus.

The global expansion that began while Romney was at Bain continued after he left. In 2000, the firm announced it was opening a new facility in Guadalajara, Mexico, and expanding in China, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea.

In addition to taking an interest in companies that specialized in outsourcing services, Bain also invested in firms that moved or expanded their own operations outside of the United States.

One of those was a California bicycle manufacturer called GT Bicycle Inc. that Bain bought in 1993. The growing company relied on Asian labor, according to SEC filings. Two years later, with the company continuing to expand, Bain helped take it public. In 1998, when Bain owned 22 percent of GT’s stock and had three members on the board, the bicycle maker was sold to Schwinn, which had also moved much of its manufacturing offshore as part of a wider trend in the bicycle industry of turning to Chinese labor.

Another Bain investment was electronics manufacturer SMTC Corp. In June 1998, during Romney’s last year at Bain, his private equity firm acquired a Colorado manufacturer that specialized in the assembly of printed circuit boards. That was one of several preliminary steps in 1998 that would culminate in a corporate merger a year later, five months after Romney left Bain. In July 1999, the Colorado firm acquired SMTC Corp., SEC filings show. Bain became the largest shareholder of SMTC and held three seats on its corporate board. Within a year of Bain taking over, SMTC told the SEC it was expanding production in Ireland and Mexico.

In its prospectus that year, SMTC explained that it was in a strong position to meet the swelling demand from other manufacturers for overseas production of circuit boards. The company said that communications and networking companies “are dramatically increasing the amount of manufacturing they are outsourcing and we believe our technological capabilities and global manufacturing platform are well suited to capitalize on this opportunity.”

Just as Romney was ending his tenure at Bain, it reached the culmination of negotiations with Hyundai Electronics Industry of South Korea for the $550 million purchase of its U.S. subsidiary, Chippac, which manufactured, tested and packaged computer chips in Asia.

The deal was announced a month after Romney left Bain. Reports filed with the SEC in late 1999 showed that Chippac had plants in South Korea and China and was responsible for marketing and supplying the company’s Asian-made computer chips. An overwhelming majority of Chippac’s customers were U.S. firms, including Intel, IBM and Lucent Technologies.

A filing with the SEC revealed the promise that Chippac offered investors. “Historically, semiconductor companies primarily manufactured semiconductors in their own facilities,” the filing said. “Today, most major semiconductor manufacturers use independent packaging and test service providers for at least a portion of their . . . needs. We expect this outsourcing trend to continue.”


Sources: Boston Globe, CBS News, Washington Post, Youtube

Obama Rolling Back Unnecessary Gov't Regulations For Job Growth! Decision 2012

Obama Administration Moves Plan To Ax Hundreds Of Regulations

The Obama administration disclosed plans Tuesday to cut or roll back hundreds of federal regulations, including some that will streamline tax forms at the Internal Revenue Service, let railroad companies pass on installing expensive new technology, and speed up the visa process for low-risk visitors to the U.S.

The administration said the regulations will save businesses up to $10 billion over the next five years and spur job growth in the private sector.

The move, announced while President Barack Obama was on vacation in Martha's Vineyard, was the latest White House gesture to reach out to a business community that has often felt alienated from the administration.

The move was criticized by some as too little, too late.

"The administration's findings and determinations, on their own, are a worthy effort at making technical changes to the regulatory process, but the results of this look-back will not have a material impact on the real regulatory burdens facing businesses today," said Bill Kovacs, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Administration officials said the plans unveiled Tuesday include 500 regulatory reforms, including more than 100 from the Department of Transportation and more than 70 from the Department of Health and Human Services. Once the reforms are fully implemented, the administration estimates businesses will save about $10 billion over five years.

Cass Sunstein, head of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said the savings for businesses will give the private sector an opportunity to create new jobs. But Sunstein said he had no estimates on how much help the regulatory reforms would provide.

Many of the regulatory reforms are designed to help small businesses, the administration said. Those include accelerating payments to as many as 60,000 small businesses that have contracts with the Department of Defense, and requiring the Small Business Administration to adopt a single electronic application in order to reduce paperwork burdens.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said the administration's announcement was "underwhelming." And the Chamber of Commerce said real regulatory reform should include permit streamlining and reforms that would make it easier for businesses to get environmental clearance to start projects.

Obama called for federal agencies to scrutinize their existing regulations after his party suffered sweeping losses in the 2010 elections. The president acknowledged at the time that his relationship with the business community had soured, and he vowed to scrap "dumb" rules that were hindering private sector growth.

Sunstein said the reforms would not impact regulations needed to protect consumers and the environment, including rules used by the Federal Aviation Administration to ensure safe air travel and by the Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration to protect food safety.

Sources: Huffington Post, U.S. Chamber Of Commerce, Youtube

Obama Stresses American Nation Building & Manufacturing Jobs (Weekly Address)

Obama: Invest in manufacturing


In his weekly address to the nation, President Barack Obama called on Americans to invest in the manufacturing industry, calling it a necessary step for spurring job creation and economic growth.

Speaking from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University, which he visited Friday, Obama began by making the case that his plan to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by summer 2012 — which he announced in a speech to the nation Wednesday — is not only in the best interest of U.S. security but also a smart move for the economy.

But turning the economy in the right direction is not enough, Obama said. “Many Americans are still hurting, and now is the time to focus on nation building here at home.”

Obama maintained that the economy can’t be fixed through spending cuts alone. He advocated investments in areas like education, infrastructure, clean energy and research and development in a bid to create middle-class jobs.

The president touted the accomplishments of a company called RedZone Robotics in developing advanced manufacturing techniques. “The folks at RedZone aren’t just solving problems; they’re working with unions to create new jobs operating the robots, and they’re saving cities millions of dollars in infrastructure costs,” he said.

On Friday, Obama launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership, which aims to bring together the manufacturing industry, universities and the government. According to the White House, more than $500 million will be invested in the program, which was created from recommendations made by the president’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

In the weekly address, Obama said the partnership has a broader mission than to create jobs. “It’s to renew the promise of American manufacturing,” he said. “To help make sure America remains in this century what we were in the last — a country that makes things. A country that out-builds and out-innovates the rest of the world.”

To the workers and families struggling to make ends meet, the president said he felt hopeful seeing companies like RedZone in Pittsburgh, which he said developed from a small school to a global university.

“We are a people who’ve always adapted to meet the challenges of a new time; who’ve always shaped our own destiny, and I’m absolutely confident that that’s what we’re going to do one more time.”


Sources: Business Insider, Politico, White House.gov, Youtube

Obama Pushes Manufacturing Job Growth In North Carolina: Decision 2012

From Now Until November 2012 President Obama Needs To Showcase His Legislative Successes To The American People.

Especially The Auto Bailout & How Quickly Banks "Too Big To Fail" Repaid TARP Funds After Their Bailout.

Despite Republican Opposition Without The Auto Industry Bailout Unemployment Would Have Been Much, Much Higher!

By The Way America Lost Millions Of Jobs Due To Former Pres. George W. Bush's Deregulated Wall Street Policies & His "War On Terror" Over A Period Of 8 Years But I Guess No One Wants To Talk About That Or Admit It!

Pres. Obama Also Needs To Continue Pushing Job Growth, More So In The Area Of Manufacturing.

Our Country Needs To Not Just Become #1 In White Collar Job Growth But Also # 1 (Again) In Manufacturing Job Growth.

Let's Begin With Rebuilding Our Nation's Infrastructure: Bridges, Highways, Roads, Trains.

VOTE OBAMA IN 2012 FOR CONTINUED SUCCESS NOT JOB KILLING DISCRIMINATORY, UNFAIR BUDGET CUTS DISGUISED AS "DEFICIT REDUCTION".






Obama in Durham to unveil job growth plan


President Barack Obama and members of his hand-picked job creation team were visiting the Triangle Monday to outline a plan for economic growth.

Jeff Immelt, the head of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and CEO of GE, said Sunday, "We thought this would be a good place to do it because it's got a lot of interesting businesses, and it's pretty much a cross-section of America in many ways."

In the morning, members of the council led "listening and action" sessions targeted to manufacturing, workforce training, energy innovation, biotechnology and entrepreneurship at three area companies and on the campuses of North Carolina State and North Carolina Central universities.

At Durham's American Tobacco Campus, the entrepreneurship group toured the American Underground office complex, home to the Council for Entrepreneurial Development and other technology and venture capital start-ups, before convening their discussion session at advertising agency McKinney.

The president landed at Raleigh-Durham International Airport just after 11 a.m. He was scheduled to speak at Cree at about 1 p.m. and leave the airport around 2 p.m. Drivers should expect delays between RDU and Durham during those times. For security reasons, the Secret Service does not publish the route his motorcade will take.

The members of the council will join the president in the afternoon at Cree Inc., 4425 Silicon Drive, for a tour of the LED-maker's manufacturing operation and a meeting with CEO Chuck Swoboda.

Obama will share the council's strategy to promote hiring and job creation across the country. He is scheduled to speak at about 1:45 p.m. WRAL will carry his speech LIVE on TV and online.

"I think the economy is getting better, but not fast enough to create the kind of jobs we need in this country," Immelt said. "I think jobs is an urgent issue.



"We're going to give him (Obama) a bunch of recommendations that are really about, in the short term, creating jobs, fixing the supply and demand," Immelt said.

While Monday's meetings are only the second for the council, Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to the president, said their work has been progressing for months.

"There's not one silver bullet answer. It's going to be literally dozens of good ideas," Immelt said.

Obama is thought to have chosen Cree as a vanguard of economic growth and clean energy technology. The company recently landed a $1.6 million grant from the Department of Energy to continue research in energy-efficient lighting.

“We’re honored to host President Obama at Cree,” Swoboda said Friday. “We look forward to showcasing our industry-leading, energy-efficient technologies and participating in discussions on policies that can spur economic growth and promote U.S. job creation.”

It is Obama's second visit to the company. He made a campaign stop there in 2008.

In a visit in March, Vice President Joe Biden said, "I don't think I've ever seen a success story quite like this one here at Cree."

With the national unemployment rate holding steady above 9 percent, the administration could use more of that kind of job news. No president since World War II has won a second term with a jobless rate above 7.2 percent, and Obama's options for achieving faster economic growth before the November 2012 election appear limited.

He carried the Tar Heel state in 2008, but voters anxious about the slow road out of recession may be looking for a change.


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Sources: Amazon.com, Voices For America, WRAL, Youtube, Google Maps

Obama Touts Auto Industry Manufacturing Jobs Success! 2012 Political Victory!

The Success Of Pres. Obama's Investment In The American Auto Industry (Manufacturing Jobs) Are The Type Of Political Successes He Should Be Throwing Back In GOP Leaders' Faces As They Slam His Efforts To Restore An Economy Previously Destroyed By George W. Bush's Deregulated Wall Street Policies.

Great Job Pres. Obama!

VOTE OBAMA IN 2012






In Ohio, Obama defends policies in face of disappointing jobs report

President Obama on Friday strongly defended his policies, especially the federal bailout of the auto industry, and pledged to fight to improve the economy, which still faces challenges to recover from a grueling recession that he inherited.

Speaking at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, Ohio, the president indirectly noted the poor jobs report that was released earlier in the day.

The unemployment rate rose to 9.1% in May, But Even More Striking The Net Increase In Jobs Was Just 54,000 A Relatively Lackluster Number.

"There are always going to be bumps on the road to recovery. We're going to pass through some rough terrain, that even a Wrangler would have a hard time with," Obama told the workers, citing the Chrysler Corp.'s off-road SUV.

The audience shouted back "No!" and Obama added with a grin: "Wrangler can go over anything, huh?"

Though he didn't directly mention the poor jobs report, it was clearly on the president's mind as he praised the government bailout of the auto industry as necessary to help some workers keep their jobs and to aid businesses that depended on workers' spending money in their communities. He carefully noted that Chrysler had paid back its loans from his administration earlier than expected.

"I don't want to pretend like everything's solved. We've still got a long way to go, not just in this industry, but in our economy," Obama said, mentioning "all of our friends, all of our neighbors who are still feeling the sting of recession. There's nobody here who doesn't know somebody who is looking for work and hasn't found something yet.

"This economy took a big hit. You know, it's just like if you had a bad illness," Obama said of the recession. "If you got hit by a truck, it's going to take a while for you to mend. That's what's happened to the economy, it's taking a while to mend.

"There are still some headwinds coming at us," Obama said, citing rising gasoline prices, political instability in the Mideast and the economic disruption from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan as among the difficulties that have hurt the economic recovery.

The economy is expected to be the key battleground in the 2012 elections, and Republicans lost no time in citing the new jobs report as an indication of what they called the failure of the Obama administration.

"Today, three years into his term, we have more news that unemployment has ticked up again," Republican challenger Mitt Romney said at a town hall meeting at the University of New Hampshire. "We have 16 million people out of work or who just stopped looking for work, millions more are in jobs that are well beneath their capacities. We have home values continuing to decline three years later. Three years later, we have a record number of foreclosures; three years later, higher gasoline prices, higher food prices. People are feeling more squeezed."

Romney is considered one of the leaders for the GOP presidential nomination, according to most polls. But the rest of the Republican field also chimed in.

"Today's underwhelming job numbers report demonstrates President Obama's failure to address the tough challenges we face as a nation," stated Tim Pawlenty. "We need a leader to stand up and make the difficult choices essential to spur economic growth and create new jobs."

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, in a prepared statement said, "Once again weak job creation and an increase in unemployment to 9.1% is further evidence that the administration's policies are failing and the Obama recession could become much worse. America cannot wait, we must take immediate steps to put America back on the path of economic growth and job creation."

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who is considering whether to enter the GOP sweepstakes for the presidential nomination, argued that he had created jobs in his state. "As governor of Utah -- while our country faded into recession -- we created an environment that brought jobs to the state without resorting to out-of-control spending and debt," Huntsman said in a statement.


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Sources: AP, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Youtube, Google Maps

Obama Urges Tax Deal, Talks "Sputknik" In North Carolina: 2012 Campaign Trail

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Speaking In N.C., Obama Weighs In On Tax Cut Debate


President Barack Obama warned Monday the United States faces a new "Sputnik moment" in an increasingly one-world economy and said it must move dramatically to hold its place as global leader.

Obama pressed anew in a North Carolina speech for an accommodation with Republicans on extending Bush era tax cuts, saying he would cede ground in his positions in order to help lawmakers reach a bipartisan compromise.

The president signaled a deal could be close, and said "we've got to make sure we're coming up with a solution, even if it's not 100 percent what I want or 100 percent what the Republicans want."

The president used much of his 10-day Asian tour recently to argue America's case for more open markets for U.S. goods, and in his remarks Monday at the Forsyth Technical Community College, he carried the appeal even further.

Proclaiming a "new Sputnik moment," Obama recalled the shock in this country over the Soviet Union's launch of the first satellite in 1957 and the national response that put America in the forefront of technology development. He said the most important competition for America today is not between Democrats and Republicans but with other nations.

"The hard truth is this: in the race for the future, America is in danger of falling behind," he warned.

In Washington, Democrats and Republicans are seeking a compromise in Capitol Hill talks on extending the Bush-era tax cuts, which are due to expire at the end of the year. An outline is emerging that would temporarily extend the cuts for all taxpayers and extend jobless benefits for millions of American.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Obama said lawmakers are still engaged in "serious debate" as they work through differences. He reiterated his opposition to a permanent extension of tax cuts for top income earners, saying the country couldn't afford them.

The negotiations between the administration and lawmakers of both parties have centered on a two-year extension of current rates.

With the nation's unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent, Obama also said it was equally important for lawmakers to pass an extension of the jobless benefits.

Republicans have insisted that any extension of jobless aid be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. The White House opposes that, saying such cuts are economically damaging during a weak recovery.

With the nation's unemployment rate hovering near 10 percent, Obama said it was equally important for lawmakers to pass an extension of the jobless benefits. Republicans have insisted that the benefits be paid for with cuts elsewhere in the federal budget. The White House opposes that, saying such cuts are economically damaging during a weak recovery.

A month after his party suffered sweeping defeats in the midterm elections, Obama said it's time for lawmakers to stop making decisions based on the political implications for the next election.

"I believe that right now there are bigger issues at stake for our country than politics," he said.

During his three-hour stop in North Carolina, Obama also offered a glimpse of his 2011 agenda as he called for new investments that would put the U.S. in a better competitive position in the world.

Obama spoke in general terms, mentioning future investments in areas like education and infrastructure, though he outlined no specific initiatives he would promote. White House spokesman Bill Burton said Obama would likely speak about some of his plans in his State of the Union address early next year.

The president also said America's competitiveness would be buoyed by favorable trade agreements, like the free trade deal completed with South Korea last week. Obama dismissed critics who argue that trade deals will hurt businesses at home, arguing instead that American companies will get a boost by expanding their markets overseas.


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Sources: Fox News, Meet The Press, MSNBC, WCNC, Google Maps

Ross Perot vs NAFTA: NAFTA Was A Mistake; Job Killer (Debate Videos)

Was Ross Perot Right About NAFTA?


Was Ross Perot right about the North American Free Trade Agreement and its effects on workers and immigration? That is the subject of my newest nationally syndicated newspaper column out this past Friday. This is a key question in the wake of Hillary Clinton trying to laugh off the topic at the last presidential debate (see the interchange here on YouTube).

Roughly 20 million Americans in 1992 thought that he was, in fact, right. Those are 20 million independent swing voters - a Ross Perot voter demographic that remains absolutely critical. Just take a look at this map - and make sure to roll your cursor over the states. Notice anything interesting? Yes, that's right: The states where Perot did best are some of the most closely divided and therefore politically important states in the country - states like Nevada, Colorado, Maine, Arizona and Oregon.

The Wall Street Journal notes, the debate over NAFTA is becoming ever more intense in the Democratic caucus race in Iowa. Ben Smith at the Politico puts the whole political question in stark relief in a story published one day after my column:

Though Perot has been off the stage for a decade, strategists in both parties recognize that his supporters remain a key bloc and that voters' dissatisfaction at the end of the administration of the second President Bush has echoes of the mood when his father was booted from office. What's more, neither party has geared up to focus on pet issues of the Perot crowd: opposition to immigration, unfettered trade and foreign wars.

Substantively, whether Perot was right is pretty clear. Though the Washington Post this morning trumpets "NAFTA's record of raising living standards here and in Mexico," as my column shows, the actual facts prove that's a typical lie manufactured by the the same paper that, as economist Jeff Faux documents, worked overtime to silence all criticism of the original NAFTA. Since NAFTA passed, Mexican wages have plummeted increasing illegal immigration pressure at the southern border. Meanwhile, American wages have stagnated, and a million American jobs have been eliminated. That says nothing about the environmental degradation that NAFTA helped accelerate.

Since the column was published, some have asked me how its possible for Mexican wages to have decreased at the same time American jobs were shipped to Mexico. Part of it had to do with the Peso crisis, but the other part has to do with how NAFTA drove Mexican farmers off their land under a glut of corporate agribusiness subsidies.

As Mexican farmers headed north to the cities and to the maquiladora border regions in search of NAFTA's manufacturing jobs (the giant sucking sound), there was a glut of cheap labor for these jobs, which was precisely the point. As we all know from our Economics 101 lessons about supply and demand, when there are more workers than there are jobs, wages go down. That's what happened in Mexico.

I hope leading Democrats take a good look at the electoral map and stop going on television and laughing at Perot. But more important than even that, I hope Congress takes a good look at Perot's arguments, and factors them in before passing the new NAFTA expansion it is considering. Those who ignore the history are doomed to repeat it - and America's middle class can't afford to be trampled yet again.


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Sources: CNN, Huffington Post, Youtube, Google Maps

Jobs! Where Are They? America's Small Businesses!

The Workforce: Where Will The New Jobs Come From?



Later this year, a marketing manager will sit down for his first day of work at HomeAway, a company that helps people rent their vacation homes online. In the firm's sleek Austin, Texas, headquarters, a glass-wrapped building decorated with travel souvenirs, the marketer will flip on his computer and do his job — a job no one has done before. This, you see, will be a brand-new job, one of the most coveted commodities of economic recovery.

How this job will come to exist is at the heart of the most pressing problem in the economy today. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the U.S. has shed 8.4 million more jobs than it has gained. The unemployment rate hovers near 10%, and broader measures of labor-market woes that include underutilized workers are as high as 16.8%. Go down the nation's list of economic problems — from mortgage defaults to state-budget shortfalls — and joblessness lurks in the background.

Even as other economic signals have started to turn positive, the jobs situation has remained bleak. In February, the economy lost a net 36,000 jobs, which is leagues better than the 726,000 lost in February a year earlier but points in the wrong direction all the same. Were the economy to magically start generating jobs at a healthy clip — say, 200,000 a month — it would still take 3½ years to return to where we were, never mind the jobs we need for new entrants to the workforce.

This reality has triggered a nearly convulsive political response, given that elections are won and lost over the state of the economy and the mind-set of wage earners.

That's why President Barack Obama, in his State of the Union address, called jobs his "No. 1 focus" and proposed repurposing bank-bailout money to lend more to small businesses, which would then, presumably, generate jobs. On March 17, Congress passed a job-creation bill that includes, among other things, an estimated $13 billion worth of tax incentives to coax companies into adding to their payrolls.

The cold truth of the matter, though, is that there's not much Washington can do to gin up permanent jobs on such short notice. The federal government is a key player in engendering job growth in the long term — by establishing smart policy in areas such as trade, education, immigration, health care, energy, infrastructure and taxes — but over the course of months or even a few years, there's little it can effectively do besides hiring directly or stepping in as a buyer of goods and services.

The great American job-creation machine always has been and will continue to be private enterprise.

The problem is that companies are beat-up from the longest economic contraction since the Great Depression. Plenty of economists think the worst is now behind us, but firms are still plagued by uncertainty about how fast the economy will recover.

Nor can they plan responsibly without knowing the bottom-line costs of the massive new initiatives out of Washington on health care reform and carbon-emission regulation. Even companies that are financially fit often don't feel like taking the risk of ramping up operations and hiring more workers. There's been political pressure on banks to lend, but the problem for some bankers, like Frost Bank CEO Dick Evans, is that many businesses are debt-shy. "I'm aggressively trying to make loans, but right now they don't want to borrow," he says. "At this point," says Harvard Business School strategy expert Michael Porter, "the No. 1 thing that will create jobs is the perception and confidence that the economy will start growing again."

The good news is the perception as well as the reality is improving in some areas of the country. Just 12 out of 384 metropolitan areas ended 2009 with more jobs than they had at the beginning of the year, but more recently, the numbers have been looking better. Over the past six months (through January), 72 cities gained jobs, according to a Moody's Economy.com analysis of data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That may seem like a slow start, but it's a meaningful one to people being hired in places like Flagstaff, Ariz., Augusta, Ga., and Lansing, Mich.

Austin lands on that list too. The central Texas city of 760,000 has a few built-in advantages over other cities. The University of Texas and the state government — Austin is the capital — provide some economic stability. And as the Southwest's technology center, Austin is home to many high-growth (though high-risk) companies.

It is also a music mecca and the gateway to Texas hill country, attributes that help it attract desirable workers. For all these reasons, it hasn't been battered quite as hard as other cities by the recession; the unemployment rate was nearly 3 points below the national average at the end of last year.

Still, the metro area has seen big job losses from major employers, including the computer maker Dell and semiconductor manufacturers like Freescale and Advanced Micro Devices. It's not hard to find the desperate stories here that you find throughout the rest of the country: the woman laid off from book publishing two years ago who hasn't been able to find a permanent job since; the interior decorator who used to have a six-figure salary and now sells furniture for $30,000 a year.

Yet Austin also offers a model of hope. The city's surfeit of computer-programming talent allowed a video-game outfit to hire 50 developers and designers in the past two months. A manufacturer is building a new plant north of town to take advantage of the growing commercial-lighting industry even as its construction-related business falls off. A pharmaceuticals start-up is looking for new lab workers.

Some companies are expanding, and others — markers of the city's entrepreneurial spirit — are starting from scratch. Austin is emerging as one of the first pockets of the country where people are getting back to work, showing that even in this dreary economic environment, job creation can happen — and illustrating how it will eventually take root around the nation.


One Created Job

To start to understand the process, swing by HomeAway's downtown Austin headquarters. This is where, sometime in the next nine months, a marketing manager will show up for his first day of work at one of the economy's newest jobs.

The story of how this job will come to exist starts five years ago, with one man's frustration at how hard it was to find and rent a beach house for his family vacation. Brian Sharples, who was between jobs at the time, didn't understand why he couldn't go to a single website — as he would go to Expedia for airline tickets — to find a comprehensive list of houses for rent. So, with a business partner, he started such a site. Five years later, the company has $120 million a year in sales, employs 600 people in five countries and is ramping up its marketing push to grow even larger. That's why it needs a new marketing manager in Austin.

HomeAway is hiring for a very simple reason: people who own houses and want to rent them out are happy to pay $300 a year to have the company spread the word — which it did in a Super Bowl commercial. "Jobs get created by providing a product or service that's better than what's out there," says Sharples. "There was an existing market for vacation rentals, and we've created efficiencies in that market. Now that it's cheaper and more efficient, more people are doing it, and the market is expanding."

In other words, to create jobs, start by creating something people are willing to pay for.

That's not as self-evident as it may sound. There is no shortage of theories about why companies aren't adding jobs faster. Banks won't lend to enable them to expand. Extra workers are too expensive because of taxes and health care costs. But the real clog in the nation's job-creating machinery is much more basic: a lack of demand for goods and services.

Just ask small businesses. American Express did that in a January survey, asking, What would most spur companies to go out and hire? An increase in customer demand, according to 42% of the respondents. Tax credits and better access to loans trailed, at 11% and 5%, respectively.

To see that dynamic in action in Austin, cut diagonally across the street from HomeAway and pop into the headquarters of Whole Foods. For a decade, the upscale grocery chain saw sales grow at about 20% annually. Last year, sales barely budged up 1% — and the 30 stores that executives planned to open around the country were trimmed to 15. Those 15 stores added nearly 4,000 jobs — just half as many as would have been gained had people kept buying organic peppers and salted caramels at the same pace. "There's too much thinking about how to create jobs," says James Manyika, a director of the economics-research outfit McKinsey Global Institute, "and not enough about how to create demand."

Why is that? Well, focusing on demand is a tricky thing to do. For decades, the economy's engine of demand has been American consumers — a population now overindebted, underemployed and endowed with a newfound sense of thrift. The explosion in credit-card and home-mortgage debt before the recession tells us the demand that was there was never sustainable. This is why the President now talks about doubling exports over the next five years and the importance of passing trade agreements with countries like South Korea, Panama and Colombia. If we can't sell to ourselves, there is at least partial salvation in selling to others.

It's also the reason the job-creation bill passed by Congress includes an accelerated tax break for companies buying equipment. Companies that sell equipment need people to build it, and companies that buy equipment need people to run and maintain it. Many firms outside of financial services have surprisingly solid balance sheets, Manyika points out, and might be wooed into investing sooner rather than later. That would drum up sales for the firms they'd be buying equipment from.

That prime-the-pump logic is also behind the use of the government to create demand — what we know as stimulus spending. Last year's $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has received its fair share of criticism for funds being dispersed too slowly and for not doing enough to stem unemployment. But in Austin, Bruce Matous has a different point of view. "This saved my family business," says the president of Matous Construction.

Matous is referring to a $28 million contract to upgrade the Hornsby Bend Biosolids Management Plant, a city-owned facility that recycles sewage sludge and yard clippings into lawn fertilizer. The city desperately needed to upgrade its 1980s-built anaerobic digesters (you can see the foam insulation chipping off) and now has the money to do so, thanks to a 30-year interest-free loan from the federal stimulus package. To get the project funded, the city applied to the Texas Water Development Board, which had been handed stimulus money by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Driving around Hornsby Bend, Matous points to a group of half a dozen workmen and says, "We would have laid off all those guys." The construction industry has been brutalized in Austin, as it has been nationally, and by the end of last year, Matous was looking at just a few more months of work in the pipeline. Then he won the Hornsby Bend contract. Now the company is fielding job applications from people 200 miles away and is creating business for other firms, from the equipment maker Caterpillar to R&R Industries, a California outfit that makes yellow safety vests and just sold a couple hundred of them to Matous.

Injecting money into the system — whether through consumer spending, business investment or stimulus funds — is a short-term fix designed to get the gears moving again. That re-establishment of momentum is an important part of economic recovery. But getting things moving isn't the same as keeping them moving. In the long term, there is only one way to create enough jobs for the economy: innovation.


Start-up Nation

Twenty miles south of Austin, in a nondescript industrial park, sits a bland, corrugated-metal building with a roll-up door. Inside the building sits the future of the U.S. economy.

Or at least part of the future. Five and a half years ago, the lights went on at Xtreme Power with half a dozen employees and a vision to make wind power an easier sell. One of the big stumbling blocks in persuading utilities to buy wind is its unpredictability. The wind blows, and then it stops, while utilities' customers demand a constant flow of power. Xtreme's solution: a shipping-container-size power-management system that takes in energy from wind farms, stores it and then smoothly releases an uninterrupted supply of it out the other end.

That innovation carries real economic value. Wind-farm operators want to sell more power, and they'll pay for something that helps them do that. As a result, jobs are created. Xtreme, which employed 57 people at the beginning of 2009, installed its first major system in Hawaii over the summer and now has $100 million worth of orders in the pipeline. The firm currently employs 105 people and is again looking to grow. Its plan is to buy a factory in Wixom, Mich., that Ford shut down in 2007.

It's the dream scenario of the green-technology revolution: a plant that used to make Lincoln Continentals starts churning out the mechanical apparatus of wind-power storage. Michigan autoworkers, knocked off their feet by a collapsing industry, put their skills to use in the quintessential "industry of tomorrow." Once those high-value manufacturing jobs are in place and a group of workers has money to spend, other jobs follow — at doughnut shops, hair salons, real estate brokerages and law firms.

Green jobs are hardly the economic cure-all they are often made out to be. They currently account for only about 0.5% of the U.S. workforce, and plenty of the industry's job growth is likely to happen overseas. China is already the world's largest manufacturer of solar panels. But the model provided by green-energy players is the right one: create new products and new markets, and watch new jobs flow. Without the personal computer, we wouldn't have Google and its 20,000 employees. Without everyday low-cost pricing, we wouldn't have Walmart and its 2.1 million.

Austin provides a useful lesson in how to stay on top of the innovation game. Start with an educated population (43% of Austin residents have a bachelor's degree or higher), mix in a robust venture-capital scene (one of the best outside Silicon Valley), add a supportive community of peers (groups like Bootstrap Austin band together hundreds of entrepreneurs) and wrap all that up with a state government unafraid to throw money at companies that need a little help getting off the ground.

Over at the University of Texas, the nonprofit Austin Technology Incubator houses fledgling firms, plying them with business-plan advice, contact with financiers and lots of coffee over which to share ideas and solve problems. The incubator's 20-year record: more than 200 companies and thousands of jobs created. "Companies don't start unless they're resourced," says Rob Neville, who launched one company with the help of the incubator and is now scaling up another, Savara Pharmaceuticals, in anticipation of support from the Texas Emerging Technology Fund.

These new companies are key to job growth. People talk about small businesses being such great generators of jobs, but a more precise assessment is that young businesses are. John Haltiwanger, an economist at the University of Maryland, has been studying government data for 25 years and has determined that about a third of all new jobs created come from start-ups. Furthermore, young companies add jobs faster. From 1980 to 2005, the typical 15-year-old firm added jobs at a rate of 1% a year, the typical three-year-old firm at a rate of 5%. "These are the rocket ships of the economy," says Haltiwanger.

Of course, young firms are also more likely to flame out and vaporize their jobs — but job destruction is, perhaps surprisingly, par for the course no matter what the size of a company. Even in the recession, about 4 million people a month have been landing jobs. We just don't feel the impact of that because more people have been losing them, leaving us with fewer employed people overall. That constant churn can be jarring for individual workers, but it represents one of the key strengths of the American economy: flexibility. That's certainly true for established companies too.

To see why that matters, stop by Ringdale, a company in the northern Austin suburb of Georgetown. One of Ringdale's main business lines used to be security systems, but as the construction of new buildings has remained depressed, so have sales of things like the ID-card readers that go inside them. Ringdale's response: throw more resources, including employees, at its burgeoning line of light-emitting-diode products, for which it holds a number of patent applications, thereby answering increased demand for low-energy commercial lighting. "We've redeployed," says CEO Klaus Bollmann, whose firm will open one plant expansion in a few months (accounting for an additional 10 to 15 jobs) and a second, larger one next year (120 more jobs). As the economy shifts, reinvent.

That good advice isn't just for companies.


Rewiring The Workforce

In northwest Austin, in cubicles packed with toys and rock-band posters, people in T-shirts and jeans are hard at work creating a video game that someday will be played online by thousands of people at a time. It takes years to produce such a complex game, representing a major investment for California-based Electronic Arts. Why is this happening in Austin? Simple. "The talent pool is here," says local BioWare studio co-head Gordon Walton.

In the national job-creation discourse, jobs often start to sound like things that companies one day decide to hand out. In reality, job creation is also a function of the labor supply. It's not just about firms wanting to hire but also about having people they can usefully employ. There are only four or five cities in the U.S. where Electronic Arts would be likely to develop such a complicated product. Austin is one of them partly because it has a tech-savvy population and a history of fielding such work — and also because it's an easy place for people to train for the profession, with local colleges offering courses in game design and programming.

In a down economy, plenty of people assume responsibility for reinvention. Lindsey Spratt lost her job as an assistant audio engineer and is now studying to be a chef at the Texas Culinary Academy. Rob Carruthers was laid off from a job as a project manager at a software company and is putting his dual engineering-business background to use as a consultant to tech start-ups and schools.

Austin also illustrates a systematic approach to making sure people have the right skills to match what companies need. For the past two years, Workforce Solutions, a government-funded not-for-profit, has been partnering with businesses and local schools like Austin Community College to develop a series of training courses to help people upgrade their skills and earn certifications. The modules are built to be accessible to people well into their careers — recognizing that a 40-year-old isn't likely to have two or four years to return to school full time — and focus on Austin's up-and-coming industries, like biotech, renewable energy and video-game development. "When these jobs come, we'll have the people with the skills to move into them," says Workforce executive director Alan Miller.

Employers are stepping up too. A few blocks east of the state capitol stands a hospital, one of 10 in the metro area owned and run by the not-for-profit Seton Family of Hospitals. An adjacent building that used to be a children's hospital now houses a clinical-education center. Wards and operating rooms are filled with patients — sophisticated, computer-controlled dummies that nurses-to-be can use to receive valuable training. One dummy even gives birth.

Health care as an industry is booming in most places, and Austin is no exception. Over the past three years, Seton has built three medical centers and hired 2,300 people. But getting people into those jobs — nearly 30% of which are for nurses — is a multipronged process. A few years ago, there was a waiting list to enter nursing school in Austin. Seton had to hire nurses trained in the Philippines. Now, with the clinical-education center's extra capacity and new partnerships with nursing programs at local colleges, Seton can hire locally.

That sort of coordination among workers, educators and companies is vital, considering that it can be difficult if not impossible for individuals to know which job to train for next. Even the head of Workforce Solutions admits that focusing on biotech, green energy and video games is really just an educated guess based on Austin's historical strengths and industries that seem poised to grow. One of the reassuring things about capitalism is that over time, workers and companies are pretty good at figuring out the most productive ways to get together. In the short term, though, that realignment can be a struggle.

Even so, there is a clear trend emerging: tomorrow's jobs will require people to add more value than ever before. Consider Samsung's only semiconductor-fabrication plant outside South Korea, which sits in northeast Austin. Since the fall, the factory, which makes flash memory for devices like smart phones and iPods, has been undergoing a $500 million upgrade. In advance of the plant's early-summer reopening, Samsung will hire about 200 engineers and technicians to run and service the new, more sophisticated equipment inside. But with the new factory and those new jobs, 500 other positions have been eliminated: robots, not people, will now transport silicon wafers.

That's actually not so awful, economically speaking. Innovation and increased efficiency are the lifeblood of any economy. But it does mean that as we tackle the topic of creating jobs, we must realize that the sustainable ones will be those that build from a human being's unique abilities, like problem solving and creativity. If we want to encourage high-quality-job creation, we need to find a way to enable economic evolution. We need to set the stage for companies to create tomorrow's goods and services, and we need to be prepared to support workers in their quest to adapt.


Washington Isn't The Answer

In Washington, the bulk of the response to job loss has been to drum up short-term demand. Last year's stimulus package kept the economy from spiraling further downward. Current proposals to extend unemployment benefits and send $100 billion to struggling local governments would have a similar effect — allowing consumers and cities to keep on spending.

Tax cuts for businesses that hire — and then retain — workers will likely wind up doing more of the same. No businessman in his right mind is going to add the long-term liability of a worker simply for the short-term benefit of a tax break. On the other hand, such incentives may accelerate some hiring that would have eventually happened anyway, and that would put more money into consumers' pockets faster. Of course, extra spending and tax cuts contribute to the $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and that drags on the economy.

Easing the flow of credit, especially to small businesses, has also been a major policy push — and a tricky one to size up. The efficient reallocation of capital is key to any economy but especially to one like the U.S.'s, which counts on dynamism as a competitive advantage. Lending to businesses is down; that much is true. But is that because banks are overly cautious and asset-impaired or because businesses are uncertain about the future — or just aren't creditworthy borrowers? A recent survey by the National Federation of Independent Business found that companies that couldn't borrow typically had declining sales or depressed real estate values. Simply opening the lending spigot doesn't seem to be the answer.

All these ideas are short-term. That's understandable. People who are out of work want immediate solutions. Politicians wouldn't be doing their jobs if they didn't try to give voters what they want.

The conundrum is that the most useful things government can do to encourage job growth aren't flashy initiatives with quickly visible results. "There's no magic wand we can wave over companies that will induce them to go out and hire people," says Matthew Slaughter, an economist at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. "We need to think long-term."

If Congress wants more and better jobs in the U.S., it should do things like create a permanent tax break for companies that invest in research and development, make it easier for foreigners who get science and engineering Ph.D.s at American universities to stick around after graduation, and spend serious time and money improving the nation's infrastructure, including the electric grid and broadband network. Such initiatives will not create many jobs that can be tallied on a spreadsheet. What they will do is more important: lay the groundwork for businesses to innovate and grow.

The same is true on the worker side of the equation. If the key characteristics of the American economy are flexibility and forward motion, then we would all be better off if people felt more support — both financial and social — to invest in their education, switch jobs and industries and venture out to start new firms.

Establishing job creation as a discrete goal is a misleading enterprise. Beyond cyclic swings in demand, what we're really talking about creating is not jobs but ideas and technologies and more efficient ways of producing and selling goods and services. If that sounds like a harder goal to set, let alone achieve, that's because it is.

Yet as Austin richly illustrates, in the wake of the worst economic downturn in generations, that sort of innovation is starting to happen. And from that, the jobs will follow.


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Sources: CNN, TIME, Google Maps