Last month here I listed 27 ideas for jobs and growth, to which reader-participant-watchdog-content-co-creators-community members added valuably, and Reason.com did its own symposium of job-creating ideas. Last night President Obama announced his $450 billion plan, reflecting, to a large degree, the consensus expressed last week by the president of Yale, Richard Levin, in his freshman address contending, "Since January 2009 it has been clear that there is only one way to prevent a deep and prolonged recession and avoid persistent high unemployment. We needed then, as we need now, a massive fiscal stimulus in the form of direct job creation, not tax cuts." I'm not an economist and don't have a Yale degree, but just as a counterargument to the Keynesian orthodoxy, let's try here to list 30 job creating ideas that don't require any additional government spending. We'll start today and try to keep up at the pace of one a day, Monday through Friday, for the month ahead.
Idea No. 1 comes from the comments on the earlier post: "Repeal ObamaCare and eliminate all the job killing uncertainty it brings with it." It's hard to measure the job-killing effects of a law that isn't yet even fully in place, but in talking to actual businessmen, even those in the health care field, one thing you hear over and over is a kind of dread of this law, of the costs and regulatory burdens it will impose, and of the time and money required even to figure it out. One other thing widely noticed is that the economy hasn't exactly taken off like a rocket since Mr. Obama signed the thing into law in March 2010. If anything, health insurance premiums keep going up since the government is now going to force people to buy the insurance.
Additional suggestions from reader-participant-watchdog-content-co-creators-community members gratefully welcomed in the comments section and will be highlighted in the days ahead.
