Back to Work - Bill Clinton [71]
There are closed paper plants all over the country that could produce pellets for export, especially those close to the Atlantic or inland river ports. This is also something that should have great marketability in China, where, in spite of poor air quality in much of the country and aggressive expansion of solar and wind generation, they’re still building more coal-fired plants.
It’s also an option for coal-fired plants in the United States. I think the coal companies should consider getting into this business themselves. The coal companies in the eastern part of the country operate in states that also have closed paper mills. They could offer both products to utilities and put people to work who’ve lost jobs in mills or mines. The EPA could help by offering utilities the opportunity to reduce CO2 emissions to the required level by either closing plants, blending pellets with coal in more of them, or a combination of the two.
32. Sell, sell, sell. The president’s National Export Initiative is, as I said, well conceived and comprehensive. But we still have to make the deals. Hillary is working hard to promote “commercial diplomacy” personally and to get our ambassadors and embassy staffs involved in increasing exports. It’s vital to involve the Commerce Department and every other department and federal agency that can make a contribution to this effort, as well as governors, mayors, national business organizations, and American chambers of commerce in other countries. China’s Export-Import Bank has a loan portfolio $20 billion larger than ours. That’s more than 100,000 jobs’ worth of difference. If we’re going to shift our emphasis from more consumption to more production, we’ve got to be able to sell.
BEYOND THE IDEAS THAT FIT WITHIN the parameters of the president’s job-generating priorities—building a twenty-first-century infrastructure, leading the world in green technologies, restoring our manufacturing base, and doubling exports—there are a few others I think we should consider.
33. Increase the role of the Small Business Administration (SBA). Our country’s nearly thirty million small businesses have created most of America’s new jobs over the last fifteen years, generated more than half our nonfarm GDP, and paid the salaries of more than half our private-sector workers. If they were a single corporation, they would be “too big to fail.” As it is, they’re often too small for banks to lend to. In June 2011, Pepperdine University reported that more than half the small businesses surveyed said that their attempts to get more capital had been unsuccessful and that banks had denied 60 percent of small-business loan applications this year.
According to Gallup’s chief economist, Dennis Jacobe, 40 percent of small businesses are hiring fewer people than they need. That’s when the SBA is supposed to step in, offering loan guarantees of 50 to 85 percent for bank loans to small businesses, with 100 percent guarantees for disaster loans. Even when the SBA does offer guarantees, small businesses often find loans hard to come by. Despite benefiting from government bailouts and sitting on huge amounts of money, most banks have proved remarkably reluctant to make even guaranteed loans to small businesses.
A little history: The antigovernment Republicans have been hostile to the SBA since President Reagan tried to eliminate it and, failing that, to make sure it couldn’t