There are a lot of incremental things that President Obama might offer up in his upcoming jobs speech after Labor Day and some of them might even get passed by Congress and this Diary is not meant to suggest in any way that they should not all be offered.
However, they will be incremental and that means they will not only provide only minor job increases, the increases will be slow to emerge and the fact is that we need jobs now and we need a lot of them.
And unfortunately, but realistically, we must be able to produce them without adding to the deficit or we run the risk that a now ticked-off rating agency, spurred on by the Tea Party will lower the US Credit Rating even further ( thus increasing the deficit even further as our borrowing costs begin to escalate ).
Follow below the fold for the actual proposal.
That said here is a proposal that President Obama could offer that will not cost a single cent of new money and yet will create nearly 8 million new jobs virtually over night.
In addition the newly hired workers will begin immediately adding some 30 Billion dollars per year in new taxes to help reduce the size of the existing debt load and of course they will add some 300 billion dollars worth of new demand to the economy which in and of itself will create new economic activity, require adding even more new labor and produce even more in new taxes.
As obviously beneficial as such a proposal would be, we can be sure that the Tea Party will not allow it to get through Congress - unless the President also offers a "sweetener" to the bill that makes adopting it absolutely irresistible.
So with no more ballyhoo here is the whole proposal
The President should propose presenting a Bill to the Congress that simultaneously provides that
! ) The length of the Standard Work Week for all companies employing over 100 people be reduced by 10% from 40 hours to 36 hours - with no reduction in pay, and simultaneously
2) Allows American Corporations to immediately repatriate to the United States their entire 1.5 Trillion Dollar overseas profit stash without having to pay a single cent in taxation.
I'll be glad to answer any questions in the comments so fire away.
The standard work week has not been lowered since the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed 73 years ago in June of 1938. It is high time that it was reduced just on its own merits but certainly in the present economic crisis it is absolutely essential to do this and to do it now.