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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.

In the new book Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President, Ron Suskind reports that President Obama ordered Treasury Secretary Geithner to consider dissolving Citigroup, while Secretary Geithner more or less ignored the order.

I haven't yet seen the books, but there's no mention or consideration in the press coverage of the property rights of Citi's shareholders.

It's not often in America that you see politicians cheer when American companies close factories and raise prices on customers, but that is Michael Bloomberg's reaction to what's happening in Kentucky. A Bloomberg Philanthropies blog post up at MikeBloomberg.com cheerily reports:

Recently the Sierra Club joined forces with Bloomberg Philanthropies to combat the dangerous health effects coal fired power has on children and families across the nation. Since that announcement, six plants have announced their intension to close.

The Louisville Courier-Journal has a news article up that blames (or credits, depending on how one sees it) the Environmental Protection Agency rather than Mr. Bloomberg for the closures. That article also gets into some of the questions that the Bloomberg Philanthropies leave unanswered:

Democratic congressman Henry Waxman's is attracting some attention with his remark to The Hill newspaper that Jewish voters are trending Republican "quite frankly, for economic reasons. They feel they want to protect their wealth."

Some are troubled that the remark somehow depicts Jewish voters as especially greedy, but what was more striking to me was the apparent concession that the Republicans would do more to protect private wealth in America, and the attendant implication that the Democrats would do more to destroy it. What's next — bumper stickers that say, "Protect Your Wealth — Vote Republican"? In 2008 such a bumper sticker would have been greeted with laughter. It's a dubious tribute to the Obama administration that such an argument is being taken seriously three years later.

Today in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass., an Entrepreneur Walk of Fame is being unveiled, honoring entrepreneurs as if they were Hollywood stars or Hall of Fame athletes. The initial inductees are Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Bill Hewlett & David Packard, Steve Jobs, Mitch Kapor of Lotus and Bob Swanson of Genentech. A press release is here, a Boston Globe news article with a nifty MIT-produced video is here, and the official Entrepreneur Walk of Fame Web site is here. Twitter: @EntWoF

It's encouraging to see successful businessmen in America being lionized rather than demonized.

The news today about UBS's reported $2 billion loss owing to a "rogue" trader sent me back to our archives to the June post about UBS considering moving its headquarters to America from Switzerland, and to the July post updating the Crony Capitalist Index (UBS is a member by virtue of its executive Robert Wolf, an Obama golf pal who was a member of the president's Economic Advisory Board). It's also worth mentioning the state of Connecticut's $20 million loan to UBS, offered as an incentive to keep it from moving to Manhattan.

Suggestion by reader-participant-watchdog-content-co-creators-community member David Moran:

Repeal the regulatory burdens of Sarbanes Oxley for all companies with less than $1 billion in sales, and index that number to inflation. Repealing the whole thing would be better, but impossible now.

This actually might cost some jobs of lawyers, accountants, and "compliance officers," but if the money now spent on such matters is reallocated instead to more productive uses, as it almost certainly would be, the net effect would be positive.

Earlier: 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.

The New York Times devotes an entire article to Governor Perry's grades in college, even while showing a remarkable lack of curiosity about President Obama's grades at Columbia.

Of all the possible things to base a voting decision on about a candidate, college grades are near the very bottom of my list. But if the press is going to scrutinize candidates on this basis, the least it can do is aim for evenhandedness, rather than harping on a Republican politician's grades while giving a Democratic politician a free ride.

Bloomberg News has an editorial on the taxation of "carried interest" for fund managers:

The president's plan would raise $18 billion more over 10 years by eliminating the special treatment of fund managers' income. Typically, general partners in private equity and hedge funds, who may or may not contribute capital to the firm, get most of their earnings as a share of the profits from the assets under management. This so-called carried interest is taxed at the capital-gains rate of 15 percent, rather than at the rate for ordinary income, which can be as high as 35 percent.

Defenders of this perk argue that it is deserved because fund managers contribute "sweat equity" to the partnership. That's a good reason for successful companies to generously compensate partners, but not to warp the tax code. Plenty of other workers sweat to make their corporations more valuable, but they don't get to claim their paycheck as a capital gain.

The Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, gave an interview to CNBC in which he said, "We have weaker growth than we thought, weaker growth than we hoped. Why is that?....You've had this terribly damaging political dysfunction here and in Europe that leaves the world wondering whether political system has the capacity to do the right thing, and that is very damaging to confidence here in the United States, and it magnifies all of the challenges we have."

This is pretty rich. First of all, it's hard to blame "political dysfunction" for the economy in 2009 and 2010, when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, unless one wants to consider the Democrats as internally dysfunctional, which they may well be. Second, if Mr. Geithner has in mind to place the blame for the "political dysfunction" on House Republicans who have been a majority in 2011 — well, there's plenty of blame for "political dysfunction" to spread around, and certainly at least some of it has to accrue to President Obama and the Democrat-majority U.S. Senate.

Open up domestic energy production, as John Hinderaker suggests at Powerline (and as was suggested here as numbers 23 to 27 of 27 Ideas for Jobs and Growth.) This means shale gas, oil sands, and drilling in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, portions of the Rocky Mountains, Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf, Pacific Outer Continental Shelf, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) – 1002 Area, National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska (NPRA) and Alaska offshore.

Earlier: 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.

Governor Perry's comment in the CNN/Tea Party debate, "if you're saying that I can be bought for $5,000, I'm offended," reminded quite a few people of that anecdote involving Winston Churchill. As Doug Mataconis asks, "Was Perry offended because he thinks he's worth more than $5,000?"

USA Today has an editorial on the energy department's loan guarantee to now-bankrupt solar energy firm Solyndra:

Even if Solyndra's collapse is nothing more than good intentions gone awry — a big if — it is a cautionary tale about why government should be extremely wary about betting tax dollars on specific companies. If there's one thing the marketplace virtually always does better than government, it's picking individual successes in an uncertain and highly competitive business. In fact, government involvement can unfairly tilt the playing field toward one company and away from competitors.

Rep. Paul Ryan is out with a new YouTube video on tax reform to make the tax code more fair, competitive, and simple. "Let more people keep more of the money they earn," says Mr. Ryan, the Republican who is chairman of the House Budget Committee.