Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Jobs

I’m getting really mad at hearing the conservative argument over and over again on creating jobs.
Step 1: Give money to the wealthiest top 1%
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Jobs

We’ve tried that and found that just like every economist, outside the Chicago School, has said before it was tried this doesn’t work. We just went through a decade of giving huge hand outs to the wealthy and every year between 2001 and 2010 the number of private sector jobs created lagged the increase in workforce. The only reason we weren’t seeing the unemployment figures going up dramatically instead of slowly was the Federal Government expanded rapidly in that time.

There are two ways jobs are created. Either there is an increase in the demand for an existing product or service, or a new product or service is created.

As far as demand for existing products or service there is only so much the government can do. If demand for a product is steady the number of jobs created from demand for that product will grow smaller as the people in that industry get more productive from advances in efficiency.

As far as creating new products the government can do a lot. Almost any research into science creates totally unexpected products.

I read an article on Cracked today “5 Inventions You Won’t Believe Came From War” and two of those items really struck this point home.

Tampons- Tampons were invented because Governments like to send their citizens places to shoot other Governments citizens. Some people like to see this as the primary role of Government.

When someone gets shot they tend to have a hole in them that gushes out blood, so the Army spent some research money on how to stop this. They researched super absorbent bandages that were given to the Army nurses to use on the heavily bleeding GI’s and of course the nurses quickly found other uses for it and a huge new market was invented.

Silly Putty – No one would spend millions of dollars to make a product that permanently has the consistency of freshly chewed gum, but Silly Putty was still made. It discovered as the US was trying to make synthetic rubber to react to the embargo they knew Japan was going to enact. One attempt was Silly Putty after a quick round of testing they figured out it didn’t make terribly useful tires, but it was sure fun to play with and a new market was born.

So in order to make more jobs and put America back to work the solution is simple. Put a huge amount of money into researching Green Technology. Not only will it keep money here in the US from energy savings, but it is bound to create totally new and unexpected products that will create more jobs.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts