???1 Million Jobs for $10 Billion.???
There???s much criticism of the Stimulus Package, but few alternatives proposed. Here???s excerpts of some of our ideasl:
Jonathan Alter noted in Newsweek that ???with 15 years of scandal-free AmeriCorps apparatus in place, service jobs can be established with Rooseveltian speed, an important criteria for inclusion in the stimulus.??? And if those rapidly deployed AmeriCorps jobs stimulated entrepreneurialism, and each generated additional jobs. ???
60,000 Youth Entrepreneur Corps jobs at $20K each for one year would cost about $1 1/2 billion
40,000 Ssuccessful-Entrepreneur jobs at $40K each would cost about $2 billion.
If they average just four jobs each in a whole year of effort, that???s 400,000 permanent, self sustaining jobs, at a cost of $10,000 each.
What kind of entrepreneurial jobs might they create? Why not ask for proposals ??? and quickly hire the best. ??? Thousands of online entrepreneurial proposals ??? noticed by the media ??? public opinion ??? .
And why not also adapt the Grameen Bank micro loan model to the US? ??? Harness latent expertise ??? an army of proposal evaluators. ??? 1,600,000 loans averaging $1000 each would cost about $2 billion. ??? 40,000 Successful Entrepreneurs on their lunch break select two per week yields 320,000 funded monthly. ??? A lot of kilns, paint sprayers, floor sanders and caulking guns bought in 2009 and 2010. ??? 10% success still yields 160,000 new jobs ??? only $13,000 per SELF SUSTAINING job.
.. $5.5 Billion of the $10 Billion proposal yields ??? 660,000 jobs, 85% of them self sustaining.
Would appreciate thoughtful comments at our more extensive Policyinnovation.blogspot.com Thanks. Jim and Dianne ©JLP2009
BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
Don’t Muffle the Call to Serve
From FDR to Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, leadership in service has always come from the president.
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The day before the inauguration is the Martin Luther King holiday, and the president-elect wants it to be devoted to service. But Barack Obama knows that one Monday of good deeds—even if it becomes an annual tradition when people help each other rather than sit home watching TV—isn't enough. Throughout the campaign, he talked about something much bigger—a new era of civic engagement, with a quarter-million young people helping pay for their education by serving their country at home and abroad.
But as Mario Cuomo is fond of pointing out, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. This year, you transition in prose, too. That means the dreams of the Obama Generation are in danger of being deferred even before their man takes office. The economists confronting the present crisis apparently don't have a lot of time for programs like AmeriCorps, which uses a network of local and national nonprofits to employ 75,000 mostly young Americans to teach kids to read, to run after-school programs, to build affordable housing, to clean parks and streams, among many other service projects. The brainiacs aren't sure these do-gooders are relevant to recovery. They're wrong about that, in more ways than one.
With the new Congress convening this week, Democrats are planning to have the roughly $700 billion stimulus package ready for the new president to sign ASAP. For all the talk of transparency, Obama's big opening act is being prepared in secret. But we know this: The "shovel-ready" public-works projects will definitely get funded; the "people-ready" good-works projects might not. And if AmeriCorps isn't expanded now, there likely won't be money for it later, when we're facing trillion-dollar deficits.
Of course that's what they all say. Everyone wants to board the gravy train before it leaves the station. The answer to this special pleading is plain. We're told the legislation won't, in Beltway parlance, be a Christmas tree, festooned with expensive ornaments that look nice in a congressional district but don't stimulate the economy.
When asked what will be "in the package" (three magic Washington words), the Obama press office refers reporters to an op-ed piece by Lawrence Summers in The Washington Post. Summers, the master of Obama's economic universe, specifies constructing schools, laboratories, libraries, roads and bridges and investing in renewable energy (the fabled "green-collar" jobs) and modern health-care systems. Each of these sectors has powerful advocates in state and local government, business and labor.
National service, unmentioned by Summers, has a weaker lobby. From the days when FDR overcame union opposition and bureaucratic resistance to form the Civilian Conservation Corps (which managed to get 250,000 unemployed young men working immediately, planting trees and clearing trails) to JFK championing the Peace Corps, George H.W. Bush's "points of light" and Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps, the leadership in inspiring service has always come from the president himself.
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