We're Totally Ready to Help Regular People Now That You're About to Vote.

After health care, bank bailouts, the debt ceiling debate, killing Osama Bin Laden, birthers, ending Don't Ask Don't Tell, saving the auto industry, and volunteering to disclose all visitors to the White House after ninety days, it looks like our government is finally ready to get serious about jobs.  I guess you don't want to rush headlong into an issue as important or sweeping as jobs until an election looms on the horizon, otherwise you completely waste any political clout from success.  So to all of those affected by the ill-timed economic crash that occurred right before a regime change, we're sorry it took this long to get to your unemployment issue... it just wasn't politically convenient before now.

But now that it is politically convenient, just try and stop the candidates from dropping economic plans that are sometimes vague, sometimes unrealistic, sometimes packaged in a way involving a low number of steps for the simple (like Sarah Palin, who is totally not running for president, and her Five Point Recovery Plan), sometimes packaged in a plan involving a lot of steps that bombard you with just how awesomely comprehensive and unstoppable it is (like Romney's 59 point plan with 10 things he could put into action on Day 1 as he fast-roped out of a hovering chopper, crashing through a skylight into the oval office like a man who gets things done!!!), or sometimes announced at a rescheduled time so as not to interfere with the start of football season.

But make no mistake, talking about jobs is absolutely going to get done.  Except that on the republican side, most of the people talking assume that government can't create jobs, so what they'll actually discuss is cutting taxes... again.  Because apparently that's the only tool in the entire universe to get an economy moving.

Of those plans, I actually kind of dig a small part of the Wall-Street-Journal-endorsed plan from Jon Huntsman.  Here's a synopsis from Business Insider:

• Overhaul the federal income tax with a modified version of Simpson-Bowles' "zero" option, which would eliminate tax deductions and credits — including the popular home mortgage deduction — in favor of a three-bracket tax rate at 8, 14 and 23 percent.

• Reducing the corporate income tax rate from 35% to 25%

• Eliminate capital gains and dividends taxes, and end the Alternative Minimum Tax

• Repeal Obamacare, Dodd-Frank, and the Sarbanes-Oxley financial reform act passed under the Bush administration.

• Streamline the FDA approval process

• Rein in the EPA's "gross regulatory overreach" and expedite environmental permitting, particularly for oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

• Restrict or replace the National Labor Relations Board

• Privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

• Approve trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and pursue new trade agreements with Japan, Taiwan, and India.

Like I said, I agree with a small part of it, specifically the first two points.  I like the idea of a simplified, progressive system.  Some might not go so far as to eliminate all loopholes, but I feel like if you're going to do it, why not go all the way?  The caveat here is that I'm assuming the deduction bullshit also gets eliminated for the corporate tax system to go along with point two.  Point three... I wouldn't mind repealing Obama-care as well, but I'd want to do that in favor of something more disgustingly socialist that severed the tie between employers and health insurance (a relic from the World War 2 era that needs to disappear).

Point is, the Huntsman plan seems relatively specific, relatively doable, and relatively logical from a conservative perspective, unlike Palin's plan to eliminate corporate taxes entirely and hope closing income tax loopholes make up the difference.  From CNN:

Palin, who raised taxes on the oil industry while Alaska's governor, proposed eliminating all corporate income taxes and making up the lost revenue by closing corporate loopholes in the federal tax code.

"This is how we break the back of crony capitalism," she said in sounding a new campaign theme that evoked memories of her Alaska days when she took on an entrenched and sometimes corrupt Republican political class that was in cahoots with the oil and gas industry.

Feels flimsy at best and the fact that it's all in service of selling her latest brain-damaged sound byte (crony capitalism... I wonder if there is an -ism she won't stick "crony" in front of?) makes it seem all the weaker.

Maybe I'm responding a bit to Huntsman's plan because I'm suffering from a case of the "Jim DeMints" (responding to the news that Obama has a jobs speech planned):

"I am so tired of his speeches, it's going to be hard for me to watch," said DeMint, who is hosting a forum of GOP front-runners on Monday in South Carolina. " ... Without sending something in writing, the president makes all of these grand gestures, and then it doesn't appear in any legislation, and then he will blame Congress for not passing something he never sends over."

I'm mostly tired of what the process has become.  Talk, posturing, out-of-touch priorities, wealthy people talking over the problems of everyday Americans.  One plan that could affect a lot of everyday Americans, but one you never hear anything about, is the Perry Preschool Project.  From NPR's Planet Money:

Preschool: The Best Job-Training Program

Economist James Heckman studied job-training programs and discovered they accomplished next to nothing.  People attending these training programs lacked certain soft skills necessary to landing and holding a job.

They involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated.

All these soft skills are very important in getting a job. And Heckman discovered that you don't get them in high school, or in middle school, or even in elementary school. You get them in preschool.

And that, according to Heckman, makes preschool one of the most effective job-training programs out there.

Heckman referred back to the Perry Preschool Project that followed two groups of disadvantaged children.  The first group received two hours of daycare, five days a week.  The second received none.  After preschool, they were left to themselves. 

Yet when researchers followed up with the kids as adults, they found huge differences. At age 27, the boys who had – almost two decades earlier – gone to preschool were now half as likely to be arrested and earned 50 percent more in salary that those who didn't.

And that wasn't all. At 27, girls who went to preschool were 50 percent more likely to have a savings account and 20 percent more likely to have a car. In general, the preschool kids got sick less often, were unemployed less often, and went to jail less often.

I'm not trying to say that James Heckman's approach is the end-all to our nation's problems, but it does something that I can't seem to find in any of the other jobs plans... it invests in the people of this country. The politicians' plans often focus on top-down, incentive-driven measures that assume all Intel needs to innovate and prosper are lower taxes.  But those top-down approaches ignore the fact that Intel was originally able to innovate and prosper because three exceptional people came together with a plan.  Simply lowering taxes places the entire innovative burden on the current institutions and ignores the fact that talented individuals were originally behind the formation of those institutions.

Businesses are just corporate shells without good people to fill them, and I wish I heard more of that from today's politicians.