The problem is a systemic cancer, and you are offering "solutions" that are band aids.
* extend unemployment benefits - and increase them
This doesn't provide a single job. All it does is shift more cost onto employers in higher unemployment insurance costs, which makes overseas labor even more competitive.
* target help to the hardest hit areas
What sort of help?
* provide tax credits to business for hiring displaced
American workers.
Shift the cost to the taxpayer. Okay for short term, but when the tax credits run out, there go the jobs. Unless you set up permanent tax credits. Is that your idea? Or if they are short term credits, the employer just takes the credit, then lets the worker go and hires a new displaced worker and gets tax credits for them.
* additional help with training, and relocation costs
We have such programs already. You still need the jobs they're being trained for. Most of the jobs that are going overseas aren't going overseas because there aren't trained workers here to fill them. No matter how well trained somebody is, they won't sew shirts for 35 cents an hour.
* in some cases, funding for new business that would hire displaced workers
Tax breaks for new business already exist. Seattle just spent hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks to get the assembly plant for the Boeing 7E7 to locate here. That wasn't creating any new jobs -- it was just moving the jobs to here instead of somewhere else.
*How much could have been done along these lines for the $ 150 billion or so being spent in Iraq in 2003-2005?
If all you want to do is create a whole new welfare entitlement program for workers, then say so, and explain how it helps in the net. But it won't.
And, BTW, a lot of that $150 billion returns to our economy. The munitions that are being used are made here. The soldiers that are there are paid in US dollars and the soldiers, since they get food, housing, etc., spend much of their pay home to be spent here. (Probably more money comes home from military stationed in Iraq than on the soldiers we have been stationing in Germany, Japan, etc. for decades.) Some, of course, stays there. But lots of that money helps out our economy -- it's not as though we just took $150 billion and dropped it in holes in the desert sand. |
