Third World America - Arianna Huffington [68]
To take just one example, as the rest of the economy was shedding jobs in 2009, the solar energy industry added nearly twenty thousand.32 The Solar Energy Industries Association estimates that the solar industry could add up to 200,000 jobs over the next two years if Congress renews various incentive programs that are expiring in 2010.33
Another way of promoting the green economy would be the creation of a national green bank, which, in the words of John Podesta and Karen Kornbluh of the Center for American Progress, would “open credit markets and motivate businesses to invest again,” and “enable clean-energy technologies—in such areas as wind, solar, geothermal, advanced biomass, and energy efficiency—to be deployed on a large scale and become commercially viable at current electricity costs.”34
Such a bank would help loosen the available credit for small businesses and establish a reliable source of funding for entrepreneurs who wish to devote themselves to green technologies and start-ups.
Reed Hundt, the Federal Communications Commission chair under President Clinton, is the head of a group called the Coalition for Green Capital, whose goal is “to establish a government-run non-profit bank that would fill the void that exists in clean-energy legislation in America today.”35 According to Hundt, a green bank would create “about four million jobs.”36 Hundt’s proposal has been included in several House and Senate climate and energy bills. And he is in talks with state governments to help them set up their own green banks.
Small businesses have long been the biggest creators of American jobs. According to a May 2010 report by the Congressional Oversight Panel, “More than 99 percent of American businesses employ 500 or fewer employees … and create two out of every three new jobs.”37 And there are many ways we can help support them: Expand the Small Business Administration’s lending programs; enact a one-year payroll tax holiday (creating a moratorium on Social Security, Medicare, and FICA taxes that will encourage businesses to hire new workers); offer businesses a tax credit for every job created over the next twelve months; and use bailout funds left in the TARP program to bail out Main Street (via increased lending to small businesses and funding of public services being cut by states and cities).
Even more important than helping small businesses is helping new businesses.38 According to economist John Haltiwanger, a study of the past twenty-five years shows that roughly one out of every three new jobs is created by a start-up company. “These are the rocket ships of the economy,” he says. As reported by Time, from 1980 to 2005, “the typical fifteen-year-old firm added jobs at a rate of 1 percent a year; the typical three-year-old firm at a rate of 5 percent.”
One innovative way of promoting job-creating start-ups is by tweaking our immigration policy. Great ideas arise from all over the world, and if America doesn’t welcome the people with those great ideas and make it easy for them to come here, they will go elsewhere. Indeed, they already are beginning to do so.
Right now, the United States has an immigration limit for skilled workers of sixty-five thousand, with an additional twenty thousand slots for those with advanced degrees from U.S. universities.39 This kind of rigid cap doesn’t make sense in today’s world. The “visa process has been plagued with backlogs resulting from this quota,” says Jonathan Ortmans, a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation, a leading center for entrepreneurship. “As a result, high-skilled immigrants are looking for opportunities elsewhere in an increasingly competitive global labor market, taking their innovative ideas with them.” If America is going to remain a First World country, it is going to have to step up the way it competes for first-class talent and ideas.
The people behind StartupVisa.com have a creative proposal for increasing America’s share in the global idea marketplace.40 They want to make it easier for foreign entrepreneurs to come to America and start job-creating