Back to Work - Bill Clinton [75]
International travel already supports nearly two million jobs in America, according to CTP. If we do this well, the initiative could create hundreds of thousands more.
43. Promote affordable opportunities to “buy American.” Roger Simmermaker, an electronics technician from Orlando, Florida, is the author of How Americans Can Buy American. It contains more than sixteen thousand products and services made in the United States and includes a special list of a thousand union-made products. Simmermaker also offers Americans a free e-guide to more than twenty-five hundred products available in popular retail outlets like Dillard’s, Home Depot, and Costco.
Diane Sawyer, the anchor of ABC’s World News, has asked Americans to join her in pledging to buy more goods made in America, saying that if all Americans on just one occasion spent just $3.33 more on goods made here, it would create ten thousand jobs. I’m not trying to put the importers and all the people who work for them out of business. I have shoes and clothes that are both made in America and imported. But today only 25 percent of our money spent on shoes and clothes goes for U.S.–made products. If we just raised it to 30 or 35 percent, we could create a lot of jobs in manufacturing and throughout the supply chain. To help us make an American choice, on these and other issues, a Florida company, Made in USA Certified, verifies companies’ claims that their materials and manufacturing are domestic.
44. Support National Jobs Day. On November 1, 2011, a group of business leaders urged the more than one million companies with fifty or more employees to hire just one unemployed person. The idea was the brainchild of Jerry Jones, chief legal officer of Acxiom. The objective is to get at least a million people hired by Thanksgiving. Jones argues that it is in the business community’s interest to create more consumers, that companies with more than fifty employees can afford to do it, and that putting a million people to work might change the prevailing negative psychology enough to spark even more hiring. This is one of those ideas that sounds too good to be true but may just be true.
45. Offer an X Prize or its equivalent for ideas that promote innovation and job creation. Every day, the press and blog sites carry new ideas their proponents claim will create lots of jobs. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler argued that freeing up the unused and underutilized spectrum, including that which is government owned, could “create a million new jobs, not to mention new devices and apps not thought possible in our bandwidth-starved world—phones that work in elevators and subways, remote auto and medical diagnostics, real-time ads on smart phones and other devices . . . and that’s just in the first six months.” I don’t know if he’s right, but it’s worth testing.
The X PRIZE Foundation runs large-scale competitions with generous prizes for ideas that lead to products worth more than the prize itself. For example, it’s offered prizes for the development of a car that gets a hundred miles per gallon and for commercially viable space travel. It’s independent of both the government and private interest groups, and wealthy individuals could be recruited to fund the prizes. I’d like to see them awarded on a sliding scale based on the number of jobs created, with a ten-thousand-job minimum. If the X PRIZE Foundation won’t do it, someone will. This would be a great commitment for the Clinton Global Initiative.
46. Replicate the prosperity centers. Earlier in the book I described the prosperity center built around computer simulation in the Orlando area. The cooperative synergies of Disney’s and Universal’s theme parks, Electronic Arts’ video games division, Defense Department and NASA training programs, and the University of Central Florida’s education, training, research, and technology-transfer capacity have attracted more than one hundred other companies