This one comes from Peter Schiff: "Abolish extended unemployment benefits." He writes:
unemployment benefits over time become more of a disincentive to employment than anything else (although the disincentive diminishes with the worker's skill level — i.e. high wage workers are unlikely to forego a high wage job opportunity to preserve unemployment benefits). For marginally skilled workers unemployment insurance is a major factor in determining if a job should be taken or not.
...After all, there are costs associated with having a job. Not only does a worker pay payroll and income taxes on any wages he earns, the loss of unemployment benefits itself acts as a tax. Plus workers must pay for such job related expenses as transportation, clothing, restaurant meals, dry cleaning and childcare, and they must forgo other work that they could do in their free time (providing care for loved ones, home improvement, etc.).
Understandably, most people also find leisure time preferable to work. As a result, any job that does not offer a major monetary advantage to unemployment benefits will likely be turned down. ...
It is no accident that employment increases immediately after unemployment insurance expires for many categories of workers. In fact, many individual will seek to max out their benefits, and remain unemployed until those benefits expire. If they work at all, it will be for cash under-the-table, so as not to leave any money on the table.
Earlier: Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 9: Waive environmental-impact reviews, making it possible to speed up start times on construction projects.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 8: Pass the free trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 7: Moratorium on significant new regulations until unemployment rate returns to pre-Obama level of 7.7 percent.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 6: U.S. work visas for foreign graduate students in science, technology, engineering and math.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 5: Repeal the regulatory burdens of Sarbanes Oxley for all companies with less than $1 billion in sales, and index that number to inflation.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 4: Open up domestic energy production.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 3: Repatriate overseas corporate profits with a tax cut or holiday.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 2: Drop the National Labor Relations Board's case against Boeing.
Cost-Free Job-Creating Idea No. 1: Repeal ObamaCare.
Thanks to all the reader-participant-community-member-watchdog-content co-creators who have already submitted ideas using the comments section, and please keep them coming. We'll be rolling them out at a rate of one each weekday until we get to 30. Remember, the concept is to devise things that the federal government can do to help create jobs that don't require the $450 billion of spending that President Obama is proposing (depending on whether you consider his tax cuts as "spending") or at least are deficit-neutral.
