By: David Gritz
February 24th, 2010

Corporate advocates and wall street watch dogs all have their own political machines armed and ready for anything in the 2010 “Obama agenda.” With the formation of a Consumer Protection Agency to reform the financial marketplace, the wall street dogs are ready for a heyday. Meanwhile, corporations are doubling their lobbying budgets and moving their operations and conferences to Washington D.C.
With all the employed enlarging their loudspeaker to the ears of lawmakers, there is no voice for the unemployed. While Obama might say his focus will be jobs for 2010, he has no idea how to start. The following list, far detached from the intentions of Obama, is a set of well rounded suggestions.

1. Draft the unemployed. Instead of a liability, our unproductive workforce can be asset. Clinton era national service programs including AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve America, and Peace Corps were created to help revive America. By diminishing work-loss benefits and payouts, the government can effectively “draft the unemployed” to serve America. A roughly ten percent hole in the economy can be revised to help rebuild infrastructure, strength diplomacy, and improve education.

2. Legalize gambling, prostitution, and drugs. Artificially limiting livelihoods is a sure way to cut the number of jobs. If congress made accounting illegal to practice next week, we would not only incriminate our auditors, but we would cut millions of jobs. The same thing happened in 1920 when America experimented with prohibition. From the start of 1920, when alcohol related livelihoods were legal, to the end of 1921, unemployment in the United States more than doubled. Conversely, the end of prohibition has a near perfect correlation to the economic recovery after the Great Depression. Once again, with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration created in 1973, the unemployment rate almost doubled again.1 Therefore we can greatly increase the supply of jobs by eliminating legal restrictions on “sinful” industries.

3. Remove minimum wage. Any economist would tell you that rent ceilings to protect low-income workers will inevitably leave more people homeless. The same concept applies for minimum wage. Wage floors prevent demand from being met. If an employer is willing to pay two workers five dollars an hour and you tell him that he has to pay each worker seven per hour, he will only hire one more productive worker leaving the worker unemployed.

4. Legalize organ sales. In the words of Levitt and Dubner, authors of Super Freakonomics, Iran has more economic sense than America in regards to human organs. One major drag on the economy is the amount of long-term care patients, of which transplant waiting-list patients make up more than 100,000. 2 This enormous drag on the economy, established with the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, could be repealed to cut medical costs and save lives. As a result of repeal, doctors would have more surgeries to perform and lawyers would have more malpractice cases to deal with, increasing net amount of doctors and lawyers.

5. “Drill baby drill.” In the words of Sarah Palin, we need to increase oil drilling at offshore platforms and in environmentally protected areas including ANWR. The more we drill here the less we drill in the Middle East. It is zero sum. Instead of funding terrorists and Saudi princes we should allocate our money to desecrating America soil. The more we drill from the U.S. the more jobs we will create and less depen dent we will be on oil from instable governments that don’t believe in human rights. Right now we spend $200,000 per minute on oil imports, that’s like giving a Ferrari to Hugo Chavez every minute or buying a private jet for Nigerian identity thieves every hour.

6. Bring back the uranium. According to George Kuczynski, executive at PPL, “We have been planning to build a multi-billion dollar nuclear power plant for years, but regulations have halted progress.” Instead of pontificating about sustainability and renewable energy, Congress should act now. By loosening regulations on nuclear power plants and passing a carbon tax, Congress can encourage a green and more radioactive future. With most of our energy infrastructure over 35 years old, a major crisis could cripple America. Therefore, we should be proactive and create some serious high-paying nuclear engineering jobs by encouraging energy companies to go “green”.