Here comes the circus…and they’re not hiring.

Political season is kicking into gear again. As always, it’s chocked full of bus tours, broken rhetoric and all the familiar trappings of our broken political system. All the candidates will be trying to convince the American public that they are the right man or woman for the job. Many of them will say they are “running on their record” and don’t want to “play politics”. As we all know that stuff is all puffery. Instead of course, it will be negative campaign ads, falsely inflated statistics and a whole lot of talk about job creation. Most political analysts say that jobs will be the major talking point this election cycle, and why not? Jobs are one of the most important things in any economy.

Unfortunately the folks really in charge of creating these jobs…businesses…are scared to death to spend any cash on creating jobs without knowing the future of their company and our country as a whole. Who could blame them? It’s a scary marketplace out there. That’s why more companies are sitting on boatloads of cash right now, unsure of what to do or how to do it in such a volatile marketplace.

Every candidate will talk about how they have created X number of jobs throughout their political careers as well as in businesses of their own. Some of them are true, some are not.

The issue is that the actual “creation” of jobs is a bit tougher than it may sound. It’s not as easy as simply making the jobs appear. Hiring extra employees can come with huge expenses at any company. Extra office space, benefits, long term expenses…oh, and what are these new employees supposed to do?

Most companies would err on the side of spending their cash on marketing or increasing demand for their product or service rather than hiring for hiring’s sake. That way when demand increases, you will undoubtedly need more staff to keep up with the rise in revenue…BAM…job creation.

What scares me is when government comes in with what they believe will be the end-all solution: Grants. Grants are monies that will eventually dry up and the programs will thus need another source for funding. Here’s one such example:

“Last year, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn announced the city had won a coveted $20 million federal grant to invest in weatherization. The unglamorous work of insulating crawl spaces and attics had emerged as a silver bullet in a bleak economy – able to create jobs and shrink carbon footprint – and the announcement came with great fanfare.
McGinn had joined Vice President Joe Biden in the White House to make the announcement. It came on the eve of Earth Day. It had heady goals: creating 2,000 living-wage jobs in Seattle and retrofitting 2,000 homes in poorer neighborhoods.
But more than a year later, Seattle’s numbers are lackluster. As of last week, only three homes had been retrofitted and just 14 new jobs have emerged from the program. Many of the jobs are administrative, and not the entry-level pathways once dreamed of for low-income workers.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer http://bit.ly/o1hjyz

Of course, many will argue that these programs take time. It was noted that they have until 2013 to spend the money. Good Luck.

Now President Obama has announced he has a job package waiting in the wings. His plan apparently calls for a $40 billion dollar extension to unemployment benefits, $30 Billion for infrastructure as well as extending the reduction of the payroll tax which could total $120 Billion. There’s more to it as well, but I’ll let you hear it from the president over the next few weeks.

Business getting those savings from the payroll tax reduction aren’t using that cash to hire people. They are stashing it away and so is the typical American. At the root of all that spending is essentially $30 Billion for roads and bridges. Something our country needs badly. Yes it will create jobs, but putting an actual number on that is, of course, the toughest part. Either way it needs to be done. Again the issue is that once the roads are built and the bridges mended, which will take time, those jobs again disappear into the night.

So what’s the secret? Really there isn’t one. Mostly the government needs to stay the hell out of business and worry about making sure the average American feels comfortable with how the country is being run, as well as their personal financial well-being. Then they will spend again and help these companies have actual recurring revenue which could be the ticket to creating those highly coveted longterm careers…not a job that will be gone again in 12 months.

Band-aids are good for scrapes and cuts, but deep gashes require medical attention. The same goes for economic issues…and we’re running out of gauze.

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