That which we call a rose, quoth the Bard, by any other name would smell as sweet.
Or, in the perhaps less elegant words of my childhood, there's more than one way to skin a cat.
They want tax cuts for the job creators. We want investment in jobs. I see no conflict between these two objectives. I agree we should reward job creators with tax benefits.
So, how about enacting a tax credit, in the amount of 100% of gross wages (and the federal government makes the payroll tax contributions), for every individual or company who hires an unemployed worker in this country for a new position?
Maybe the credit would be for a defined period of time -- a year, two years? Maybe it continues until the economy gets to a pre-determined unemployment rate -- say, 7%? Or maybe it decreases incrementally as the unemployment rate decreases, measured annually or quarterly or whatever makes sense: for each 1/2% decrease in the unemployment rate, the credit decreases by 20% going forward.
There should probably be a cap on the credit per employee -- we don't want to spend 8 million government bucks to hire an upper level executive who will then stash 7 million of that in offshore investments; we want to use that money to hire 100 middle-class manufacturing workers who will put 90% of what they earn back into this economy and fuel the demand for even more jobs.
So maybe there's a $100K cap on the credit per employee (including wages/salary + payroll taxes). If you want to pay someone more than that, great, but if they're worth that much money to your company you can come up with at least a few bucks out of your own pocket.
And there should probably be some kind of safeguards in place to ensure that employers don't pay ridiculously high wages just because they are playing with public money. So a requirement that they be able to demonstrate that what they are paying is a market wage.
No credit for H-1B hiring. No credit for hiring someone at a location other than American soil. No credit for hiring to replace someone who retires/quits/is fired after the bill is introduced, or after it gets into or out of committee. No credit to those who have adopted the execrable policy that "The unemployed need not apply." This credit would be given for employing a worker, here in this country, for a job that does not currently exist.
A 100% tax credit means private employers are used as a conduit for direct federal investment in jobs. The moneyed class get their tax cuts, and we get something that smells every bit as sweet as a direct federal hiring program. It's a new WPA in a Republican-friendly wrapper.
And it means that companies have no excuse to hold back on hiring. Right now there are a lot of companies that have no reason to hire anyone because demand is depressed. But there are some companies that would love to hire if they had the money, or if they weren't afraid to spend the money in this stinking economy. Those are the ones who would take advantage of this credit.
And once they do that, demand would rise and there would be more and more companies with reason to expand their operations. It would start gradually, but soon there would be a veritable onshore hiring frenzy. (Remember Cash for Clunkers?) Every $100 billion allotted to this would directly result in somewhere on the order of 1.25 million jobs -- but indirectly the benefit would be much bigger than that over time.
The Republicans should love it because it allows their corporate masters to do what they love best: Socialize the costs of hiring employees while privatizing the beneifts. And besides targeting tax benefits to the real job creators, it would cost a hell of a lot less than the Bush tax cuts. I'm no economist, but I would bet that once the economic analysis is done, we'd find out that rather than costing the government money, this plan would result in a net revenue increase.