This one is from Paul Kedrosky, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation:
Give every foreign graduate student in a U.S. science, technology, engineering, or mathematics program a work visa. Better yet, give them a green card. Foreign-born technologists are among the most predictable creators of new companies, many of which go on to create success here, hiring madly the whole time. Instead, we send them home. Stupid.
Some variants on this idea make the green card conditional on graduation, but then you lose the ones who come up with a start-up that is so good it is worth dropping out of school for.
Earlier:
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.