Very soon, our seniors will be graduating and thrust into the workforce where they will meet an unemployment rate of 14.2 percent, according to bls.gov. In fact, according to theatlantic.com, 53 percent of recent college graduates are jobless or unemployed.
President Obama said that if he can’t restore job growth to the pre-Bush era, where unemployment was below 5 percent, it would be a “one-term proposition.” But can we really blame Obama? If Bush put the country into economic strife over the coarse of eight years, how can President Obama get it back up and running in three years or less?
Let us look at the facts. President Ronald Reagan inherited an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent. When he sought reelection, unemployment went down to 7.3 percent. One of the main things the Reagan administration did that President Obama refuses to do is embrace our surplus in natural resources or encourage free enterprise and competition.
For example, why is the unemployment rate for mechanical engineers at 3.8 percent, according to CBS News? Because the oil market is controlled and regulated by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and there is no incentive to create an alternative form of energy that is cost efficient. Therefore, companies are not hiring engineers the way they did in the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and W.Bush era.
The Minerals Management Services states that there is an estimated 18 billion barrels of oil just off of the Gulf Coast, not taking into account other places in America. We need engineers to devise ways to tap into new sources of oil deep underground and offshore to be forever independent of other countries who are in OPEC.
President Obama invested money into Solyndra, and that went bust. He is right that the future is in alternative fuel, but we need to do one more thing before we can start hiring engineers and make that unemployment rate drop: Increase competition. Do not tax the rich more. Let them hire more employees, as well as increase employee benefits.
According to Forbes, it is actually easier and cheaper to set up a foreign corporation, produce product in a foreign country, and ship the product to the United States than it is to produce products in the United States. This is because of the regulation and fees that the government imposes.
The only way to solve this problem is to create an incentive to make it popular, not only for American businesses to make products made in America, but also export American products to other countries. It is a simple formula: Competition+Incentives+Company Growth= entry level jobs for college students and overall job growth.
Many older professors who read this might be familiar with this formula. It is called “Reagonomics,” where you reduce the growth of spending, reduce income tax and capital gains tax, reduce government regulation of economy, and control money supply to reduce inflation.
The formula for creating job growth is simple and has been successfully implemented before.
The author’s name has been redacted by request.