Back to Work - Bill Clinton [77]
In an August 31, 2011, article in USA Today, Michigan’s former governor Jennifer Granholm and Daniel Mulhern suggested, as I have, repatriating offshore earnings of American corporations at the 15 percent capital gains rate and using a lot of the money to fund a “Jobs Race to the Top,” modeled on the Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, in which effective public-private partnerships would compete for grants and no-interest loans. It’s a good idea.
These kinds of innovation clusters can spring up everywhere in America. They’re models of freedom, creativity, and cooperation. Innovators, entrepreneurs, patient investors, venture capitalists, established companies, private foundations, universities, community colleges, and federal and state agencies work together in ways that create jobs, good incomes, and wealth.
In other words, made-in-America prosperity looks nothing like the food fight in Washington. Its hallmark is cooperation, not conflict. The private sector views its public sector partners as indispensable allies, not the tax-grabbing, wealth-robbing predators of antigovernment mythology. When you’re actually trying to create new businesses, new jobs, and new wealth, you do what works.
We all need to do what works. And we don’t have a day or a dollar to waste.
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1 Ireland has lost a lot of its good jobs since the crash, because its banks were among the most highly leveraged in Europe. Once the Irish work through the debt overhang, they’ll be highly competitive again.
2 There’s one big roadblock to this proposal. The Joint Committee on Taxation will “score” repatriation as costing $80 billion in revenues, even though we’re the only OECD country still taxing overseas income. Under the budget agreement the administration would have to come up with $80 billion of further cuts to gain far less than that to seed the infrastructure bank. If this unrealistic position can’t be changed, Congress must complete the corporate tax reform as soon as possible.
3 If you want more information, check out Google.org’s The Impact of Clean Energy Innovation.
4 This is an idea I first heard suggested by Newt Gingrich.
EPILOGUE
Time to Choose
WHAT KIND OF FUTURE DO WE want? Do we want a country where we work together to restore the American Dream and rebuild the middle class? What’s the smart, effective way to do that? With a strong economy and a strong government working together to advance shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity? Or with a weak government and powerful interest groups who scorn shared prosperity in favor of winner take all until it’s all gone? That’s really where antigovernment, “you’re on your own” policies will lead us.
If we want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, we’ve got a lot to do, and we need to get moving.
Everywhere we look, across the world and within the United States, prosperity is produced by networks of people committed to productive investment over unaffordable consumption, to creative cooperation over constant conflict.
It won’t be easy to create a prosperity environment everywhere in America, not only because conditions and resources vary so much, but also because thirty years of bipolar antigovernment politics have given us a severe case of collective attention deficit disorder. We respond predictably to the same old adrenaline shots from politicians and pundits. We don’t much like being around, listening to, or learning from people who disagree with us. And we worry that our best days may be behind us.
They may be. But they don’t have to be.
When a lifelong Democrat, Bill Bishop, can write in his book, The Big Sort, that he misses his talks and arguments with his only Republican neighbor, who moved across town in Austin to a heavily Republican area because, except for Bishop, his Democratic neighbors made