Vainly seeking a clue
IBD on the administration’s job-creating efforts:
the Jobs and Competitiveness Council…full of Fortune 500 CEOs — General Electric, American Express, DuPont, Time Warner, Eastman Kodak and Xerox…
GE’s domestic workforce shrank by 25,000 — almost 16% — between 2001 and 2010, according to the company’s annual reports…AmEx employed 28% fewer workers in 2010 than it did a decade ago…Kodak’s workforce cratered to just 18,800 last year from 75,000 in 2001…Xerox’s employee base shrank by nearly a third between 2001 and 2009…
the council is all but devoid of the kind of small- and midsize firms responsible for two-thirds of the nation’s new jobs.
Two of the members of the Council had an op-ed in the WSJ that said: “Over the next 90 days, we will turn to addressing the actions needed to make a more significant, longer-term impact…First, we need to focus on fast-growth companies and small business.”
A rational approach would be to have small business and growth companies at the table. But that would appear to be too much to ask of this crew.
June 15th, 2011 at 11:20 am
Small business owners lay awake at night figururing out ways to grow, to improve, to compete, and to do it all in a fiscally responsible way. CEO’s of F500 companies lay awake at night figuring out ways to make spreadsheets look better; sometimes it is layoffs, sometimes it is moving overseas, sometimes it is closing facilities all in the name of gaining a tenth of a point and they are good at it. Evidence – The stock market will surge as those F500 ceo’s cut costs but employment doesn’t move.
So why, if you are trying to grow jobs, would you only have the big boys involved? Oh, silly me, I forgot, it has nothing to do with jobs. That is just the cover story. Those big boys donate money and sitting administrations want that as much as they want jobs.
If Obama ever came and asked me what he could do to grow jobs I would have to tell him to go home and do nothing for one year. Don’t help us, just go home and be quiet. We’ll lay awake and night and figure out how to build jobs if he and his friends in congress would just promise to shut up and stay out of the way.