The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness Fantasy

The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness has all the same trappings of an administration commission that the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform did. The reform commission recommendations to balance the U.S. budget were set aside as unrealistic. The same will happen with the competitiveness report that will be issued today.

The competitiveness council is just as blue ribbon as the one established over a year ago to make suggestions to cut the U.S. deficit. Former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles and former Republican Senate Whip Alan Simpson led the fiscal reform group. The jobs commission is headed by the chief executive of the largest conglomerate in the world — Jeff Immelt of General Electric (NYSE: GE).

Each of these panels, like most before them, gave the president a series of remedies for a major national problem. In the case of Immelt’s group, the persistent problem is joblessness in America. The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness calls for large foreign investment in U.S. business, taxes that favor business and employment creation, aid to entrepreneurs and the infrastructure expenditures that are part of the current Obama jobs plan and the older $787 billion stimulus plan — a plan that barely worked.

The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness 52-page report is due to be released today.

These programs always face the same two obstacles. The first is that Congress must be involved in supporting most of the recommendations, or at least those that pertain to government expenditures. The president’s jobs bill has many of the same goals as his competitiveness commission. That means some large portion of it will be debated and approved by a Congress that has a habit of turning aside the president’s proposals.

The other, and probably greater, enemy to the recommendations is the government’s built-in bureaucracy. The dozens of departments and agencies that have to make the details of any broad economic revival plan work slow – even for plans that are urgently needed.

The commission would have been better off to offer the president a set of recommendations that large American companies are willing to adopt themselves, either with the government’s aid or without it. It would be a gesture of good faith for GE, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), and Boeing (NYSE: BA), all of which have CEOs on the blue ribbon committee, to say they would make billions of dollars in investments along the lines of what they have recommended to the president. Each of these companies has billions of dollars in cash. There is no evidence that any of them has hired large numbers of new workers recently. As a matter of fact, Intel laid off 6,000 people just two years ago. Boeing fired 1,100 people earlier this year and has cut 13,00 jobs since the mid-1990s. GE has also made significant jobs cuts in the past two years.

The track records on jobs of the members of the committee may be pertinent, but they are not the most severe obstacle to the adoption of its recommendations. The bickering in Washington and the unwieldiness of the federal system are.

Douglas A. McIntyre