ParisTampaBlog

In a recent article in Bloomberg Businessweek Andy Grove says that the way to make American jobs is not start-ups, as Times op-ed writer Friedman would have it, but tariffs!

This is how he puts it, “Levy an extra tax on the product of offshored labor. (If the result is a trade war, treat it like other wars—fight to win.)

And a bit later, “If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.”

Now if the head of the local machinists union, no. 1275 were to say this we wouldn’t give it a thought, or a even passing glance. For all union officials are programmed to see no further than the job security of their members.

But Andy Grove? Although he didn’t found Intel (that was Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore and friends) he is now credited with having transformed the company from a manufacturer of memory chips into one of the world’s dominant producers of microprocessors.

He became Intel’s president in 1979, its CEO in 1987, and its Chairman and CEO in 1997, and during his tenure as CEO, he oversaw a 4,500% increase in Intel’s market capitalization from $4 billion to $197 billion, making it, at the time, the world’s most valuable company.

So yes, when he talks about start-ups and job creation we have to listen. But not for long. 1979, the year when Grove became Intel’s president, is not 2010. The world has changed and Grove doesn’t seem to have noticed.

Just one week later, also in Bloomberg-Business Week, Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at University of California at Berkeley, makes this clear. Start-ups, he says, do create jobs.

“The Kauffman Foundation’s analysis of Census Bureau statistics shows that net job growth in the U.S. economy occurs only through start-up firms. From 1977 to 2005, existing companies were net job destroyers, losing 1 million net jobs per year. In contrast, new outfits in their first year added an average of 3 million jobs annually.”

Also, he points out that tariffs have been tried before, with the goal of stemming job losses. In the infamous case of the The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of June 1930, that which raised U.S. tariffs to historically high levels, jobs were not created but destroyed.

So what has happened to Grove? He must know the history of tariff wars and how little they benefit the participants.

Wadhwa makes his own common sense recommendations for what we might do to create additional jobs.

First we need to upgrade our investment in workforce training and development as a national priority. We need to have the concept of lifelong education become part of our culture. Education … is the best way of staying ahead in the global race for skills.

Second, we need to foster entrepreneurship at the source…. What inhibits Americans from starting companies is a lack of knowledge of how to do it, lack of financing, and fear of failure…. a significant proportion of the workforce can be taught to start successful companies and create jobs.

Third, we need to recruit the world’s best and brightest to the U.S. and do all we can to keep them here …. These skilled workers tend to be highly educated, to understand foreign cultures and markets, and to be highly entrepreneurial.

Fourth, we need to more effectively tap the gold mine of knowledge and innovation locked in our universities…. by building mechanisms [that promote] the nexus between the scientists who make the discoveries, the universities that market the discoveries to the world, and the entrepreneurs with domain experience who could take these discoveries and turn them into products.

Lastly, he says, and probably Andy Grove would agree, we need to provide incentives to American companies to keep research in the U.S. … The lure for these companies isn’t just cheap labor but also heavily subsidized infrastructure and cash subsidies. We may have to level the playing field [but not start anything like a tariff war as in 1930] in those industries where other countries aren’t playing by the rules.

I voted for President Obama. At the time probably because of what I saw as his reasonable stance on most things, in particular for what he wrote in the two autobiographical works published well before the presidential campaign, and for the many thoughtful and persuasive talks and speeches he has give during the recent past, both prior to and during his presidency.

I voted for him also because his election, as I thought at the time and still do, would take us another giant step forward in our march towards equality of races and peoples.

No matter what the subject, first the Senator and then the President always seemed to have thoroughly mastered the material in all the relevant details. Invariably I would come away from listening to him persuaded that he had missed nothing important.

I had much the same kind of feeling you get after reading a white paper or an article in the encyclopedia, those inclusive treatments of a subject that do justice to all the varying points of view.

Well what has changed? Why am I now questioning my support for the President? Probably not Obama himself, nor his ability to make good speeches. But it has become all too evident that the speeches are not enough to satisfactorily handle the burning issues and questions of our times.

And the burning issues that call out for something else, that call out for strong leadership, are many. There are the war, the millions of the unemployed, the sputtering economy, the oil spill in the Gulf, and others, real problems that continue to resist the President’s efforts to either contain them or change and resolve them for the better.

On the other hand there are those, mostly on the Left, who praise this President, placing him up there right along with FDR and Ronald Reagan in respect to his two major legislative accomplishments. These being:

A health care reform bill that corrects some of the most unsatisfactory elements of an earlier, inadequate health insurance system, and a financial reform bill that substantially strengthens government regulation of Wall Street, lessening if not eliminating some of the worst abuses of the financial industry.

But, and this also has been said by others, both reform bills are creations of Congress, not of the President. Instead of going to the leaders in Congress with his own ideas he called them and asked for their ideas, and expected them to write the text of the legislation.

He didn’t go to them as a leader, taking his own ideas with him. And in fact one is not even sure what the President’s own ideas are, his failure in this regard being a major source of my own doubts regarding his presidency.

In any case the result is that both bills suffer from being creatures of Congress, a kind of a mythological hydra or many headed creature, representing as it does multiple messages stemming from multiple and powerful lobbying groups.

We really don’t know what to think of these two bills, whether or not they will turn out to be real, substantial reforms of health care and banking and business practices. Because both bills reach us without an accompanying, single, powerful reform message from the president, one that would have better served to carry our country forward than the chatter of the headless and nameless Congressional authors.

The President from up on a bully pulpit ought to have got behind the several, perhaps as many as 10 or so reforms that everyone could agree were necessary, such as making health insurance affordable for the millions now not able to pay the premiums, such as eliminating the insurance companies’ practice of holding preexisting conditions up as a reason for rejection, such as enabling workers to hold onto their health insurance even when losing their jobs….

And in respect to financial reform, measures such as ensuring that shareholders and creditors — not taxpayers — bear the losses when big financial institutions fail, such as establishing new capital requirements for banks in order to limit speculative excess, such as the regulation of derivatives, such as appropriate restrictions on proprietary trading….

It’s not that these and other needed reforms are not within the bills passed by Congress. But they’re buried there in thousands of pages of what we have to call bureaucratic gobbledygook, that which puts them out of easy, perhaps out of any reach at all of the people whom they are supposed to curtail or benefit.

And worse, the few who do read them and understand something of what is being said will probably find in the thousands of pages hundreds of ways around their provisions, and in many respects things will go on much as before, although with additional government workers and regulators, if not new departments, to manage the bills’ provisions whatever they may turn out to be.

So far I’ve only spoken of the President’s “successes,” and how these will suffer from being without his leadership. When one turns to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the oil spill in the Gulf, there are no successes. Nor is there presidential leadership.

In regard to Afghanistan it’s as if the President were ignorant of the past, in Afghanistan of a past that is centuries old, and in Vietnam of our own recent past experience in that country. In two un-winnable wars, and elsewhere, the President continues to sacrifice the nation’s blood and treasure, and for no good reason. And I continue to wonder why.

And again regarding the oil spill in the Gulf why here also has he left leadership to others? He might not have been able to plug the hole as his daughter wanted him to but he could have at least made sure that from the beginning the number of actors in the Gulf, —Federal and State authorities, local governments, private organizations, and many others— were all coordinating their efforts to clean up the spill if not stop the flow.

He didn’t do this, and too often we heard stories of how this or that initiative or step in the clean-up process was not taken because of disagreements among the various organizations working, but not working together, there in the Gulf.

So I’m left with questions, and so far the single answer to all of them seems to be that the president is not up to the task of leading the country out of the several deep quagmires in which it finds itself.

In Afghanistan the President doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that the war, now in its ninth year, is going nowhere, that people are dying, or living but losing both arms and both legs, and for no good reason, and that there is no end in sight other than eventual withdrawal following a recognized failure to change things on the ground, at least for the better, if not in our favor.

Finally, in regard to what is still the freest market economy in the developed world the President doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that our country’s wealth, and health, are probably more dependent on the private sector than on the actions of his government, and that by his continuing to strengthen the government’s part in regulating and controlling the health and financial industries he is also running the risk of diminishing the people’s part, making them less responsible for their own lives and actions, and thereby weakening the private sector, which is still, in spite of the growing reach of the welfare state, the principal source of the country’s wealth.

Entitlements, including public schooling, social security, medicare and medicaid, ought to have tightly targeted with their benefits those populations in obvious need of help. Instead, too many, many not in need, tend to benefit from Obama’s and earlier entitlement programs, with the result that their cost is becoming more that the country, which means ultimately the private sector, can possibly bear.

Doesn’t the President realize this? Does he think that there are not strict limits to what the government can do for the people? Governments, including that of President Obama, tend to make all their reforms blanket reforms, leaving no one out, perhaps because that’s what’s going to get the members of that government re-elected.

I’ve never heard the President say that his government, any government, needs to live within its means, and that the funds are just not there to pay for the two wars, to bail out the automobile and financial industries, nor especially will there ever be enough to assure access for everyone to whatever health care is out there and available regardless of the cost.

My disappointment with the President has been that he sees the principal role of government as doing things for the people, making their lives easier, solving their problems etc. — rather than employing government programs and services, such as schools and neighborhood health centers, not to mention police and fire departments, to help people become better at doing things for themselves.

Just as one raises children to fend one day for themselves, so governments should be doing this, as much as possible, with the people who have elected them.

Mostly he didn’t need to. He knew then that Harvard was only getting in the way of his learning.

Much as the public school gets in the way of kids learning.  And they drop out.

How many of you ever think of the fact that our public school system is just one huge entitlement paid for mostly by taxes on the upper middle classes, many of whom don’t even have kids in the public schools?

Now schooling being an entitlement there is the danger, as in all entitlement programs, that the stated goals of the providers and spokespeople, in this case the educators, will not always, nor even in most instances, be accepted, let alone understood or acted upon responsibly by the beneficiaries.

For kids in school by and large do not take principal responsibility for their own learning, no more than do “welfare” recipients for their own lives.

Bill Gates left Harvard to take on the responsibility for his own learning and Microsoft was the result.

Just recently Bill Gates in a “talk” at the Aspen Ideas Festival, perhaps remembering his own situation decades ago, said that kids needed only to want to learn, and then occasions for their learning, given the internet and the number of “schools” or learning opportunities freely available to them online, such as the Khan Academy of which he spoke, will do what the school entitlement failed to do, and he or she will do what they both were genetically programed to do and learn.

The subject of President Obama’s most recent address was immigration. The Times in an editorial about this speech had two things to say, two things that I might have said myself, and almost with the same words. Although I don’t always agree with the Times editorial positions in this case I did.

Two things, one, that the President’s speech “had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate.” I agree, it did have that. Obama touched reasonably and accurately all the bases, neglecting neither the conservative nor liberal positions in the debate over immigration.

It’s true that we’ve come to expect great speeches from the President, perfect renderings of the subject at hand, —whether it be racism, moderate Islam, economic collapse, or any number of other critical national and world-wide issues —where nothing of note is overlooked.

Yet as the Times points out, and number two, my second point of agreement with the editorial writer:

“Mr. Obama’s call to action applies not just to Congress but to himself as well. He neatly defined the obstacles to a comprehensive bill….But Mr. Obama has presidential powers, and he should use them.”

That he should! Use the real power he has, not just to persuade us by his reasonableness, but to lead us by his action. Get up and out there and lead from the bully pulpit. Great speeches are just not enough. As for the speeches he might have remained in Chicago. He is in Washington where we expect more from him.

While speaking, because he has to go on speaking, he should be much more in contact with the particular problem he is addressing. In regard to the oil spill in the Gulf is he aware that the Coast Guard, the Feds, the locals, the staties, all the many others involved in the clean-up are not coordinating their efforts, with the result that much time and money is being wasted? If he is aware why isn’t he the coordinator?

In Afghanistan the principal problem, as in Vietnam before, is that we haven’t won over the people to our point of view of what’s best for them. For the most part they don’t even want us to be there.

Why isn’t the President confronting this problem head on? Either convincing us that we should stay, or getting us out and bringing to an end what seems more and more like a terrible sacrifice of blood and treasure in a cause no one believes in. Not an impossible task, but he evidently sees it that way and therefore avoids facing up to it.

And in regard to immigration debate before us why isn’t he out front, stressing the great importance, say, of getting behind potential entrepreneurs, many of whom have come here as students and have not remained because we have not made it easy for them to do so. He must know that these entrepreneurs have the power to grow the nation’s economy and thereby create jobs for the now millions of jobless.

And why isn’t he doing more for the children of illegal immigrants, those who have lived most of their lives in this country but who are not citizens? We need these children as much as they need us. Why does the President allow them to be threatened with deportation? Why doesn’t he become their spokesperson as they are in no small degree the future of the country?

And there is so much more he could be doing, that would promise more for the country’s future than building walls along the border and putting, as he says and repeats in his speech, more “boots on the border.”

How does he reconcile these “boots on the border or on the ground” with the words of Emma Lazarus that he cites in the conclusion of his talk, “Give me your tired, and your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free?”

It is no longer enough, if it ever were except as a university lecturer, or perhaps while campaigning for office, merely to display one’s full understanding of the issue.

The President ought to drop the mask of evenness, of reasonableness, of acceptance of all points of view, get “narrow,” get fiery and angry, and yes speak out but from a bully pulpit, and in doing so lead the people and the country to needed action, dragging us along if necessary, in order to get behind real changes that will insure our country’s future. Isn’t that the principal role of the President?