The news that the national unemployment rate has dropped to 8.6 percent and that our economy added another 140,000 private sector jobs in November is promising. President Obama proclaimed in a speech last week that despite some strong headwinds this year, the American economy has now created over the past 21 months nearly 3 million new jobs in all, and more than half a million over the last four months.
President Obama was joined by former President Clinton at New York’s famed Empire State Building that is in the middle of a retrofitting project to make it more energy efficient. News reports state that the retrofit is creating 250 full-time jobs in construction and paying for itself by saving $4.4 million a year in energy costs.
In keeping with the energy efficient notion the president announced the Better Buildings Initiative slated to improve the energy efficiency of America’s commercial buildings 20 percent by the year 2020. He asked Congress to move on providing more effective incentives for commercial building owners all across the country to move forward on these energy-efficient steps.
Instead of waiting for Congress to do anything, however (and since elected officials on both sides of the aisle can’t seem to get anything at all done) the president is directing all federal agencies to make at least $2 billion worth of energy-efficiency upgrades over the next two years.
President Obama said, “None of these upgrades will require taxpayer money to get them going. We’re going to use performance-based contracts that use savings on energy and utility bills to pay the contractors that do the work. And it should keep construction workers pretty busy. In fact, this is something that the Chamber of Commerce has said is critical to private sector job creation.
“We now have 60 major companies, universities, labor unions, hospitals, cities and states, and they are stepping up with nearly $2 billion in financing to upgrade an additional 1.6 billion square feet of commercial industrial space by our target year of 2020. That’s more than 500 Empire State Buildings.”
Regardless of what side of the political spectrum you sit, if we can create private sector jobs without the aid of taxes, then it’s got to be a good thing. Americans are tired of bailouts and government incentive programs that do little to help the economy.
Meanwhile two items seem pertinent in the economic challenge. First Congress should extend the payroll tax cut for working Americans for another year. However, they should also decrease the payroll tax paid by small businesses that have been keeping people on the job at great sacrifice to the small business owner.
Second, if Congress sees fit to renew unemployment insurance for Americans who have been looking for work for some time, they must add incentives to those payments. Unemployed people should be required to provide some kind of community service or internship while they continue to collect money from the government. There has to be an incentive to return to work for the last 8.6 percent of those who are unemployed.
On a final economic note: 212 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 195 million last year. People also spent more, with the average shopper spending $365.34, up from last year’s $343.31.
Total spending reached an estimated $45 billion. Online retail commerce in the U.S. alone will grow 13.2 percent to $187 billion.
Spending is good for the economy. But shopping and buying locally is even better! pha
