Jobenomics, outlines a plan for producing 20 million new American jobs by 2020. The plan in nicknamed the “20 in 20 Plan”. The number 20 million comes from two sources: historical precedent and projected future requirements. Historically, the decades of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s produced 20 million new private sector jobs. So, the 20 million job goal was achievable in recent history. The author argues that the initial emphasis should be in the service-providing sector, where the vast majority of Americans are employed.
The first step for a 20 by 20 small business campaign is to identify proper small business incentives, and develop a small business information system that could collect and feed more complete and detailed data into the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Labor Force survey and statistical process.
Today, a total of 35 million people work for the government, including 22 million civilians, 10 million government contractors, and 3 million in the active and reserve armed forces.
While four sectors (food, transportation, metal, and computer/electronics) are equally important, transportation may be the best area for the initial 20 by 20 campaign.
In order to focus federal R&D resources on emerging technologies and businesses, the federal government should consider establishing a national information management system that would identify existing sources of funding and tie federal department R&D and the 36 Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) expenditures to specific national business objectives.
The government needs to better understand the size and contribution of the overall US expat community to the same degree that it keeps detailed accounts on overseas US military personnel and civilian contractors—overwhelmingly the largest off-shoring jobs operation in the world.
For example, the market cap for Google and General Electric are about the same ($190B versus $166B), but Google has 10,000 employees, compared to 323,000 at General Electric.
The other alternative is to look at major system-of-systems engineering firms, like SAIC, that are comprised of tens of thousands of small and emerging business units.
If Lockheed Martin is able to negotiate a sale of fighter aircraft, or Boeing a commercial aircraft, the US Department of Commerce, along with a team of governors and mayors, should try to exploit this sale with other products and services at the national, state and local levels.
In other words, investors could buy and hold with reasonable IRRs (internal rates of returns) until the market recovers.
This chapter concludes with the observation that educational benefits are powerful incentives to get people to work, especially for entry level employees, the underemployed and the unemployed.
In addition, a concerted national effort to upgrade residential real estate to energy efficient and green standards would also help the construction and manufacturing industries, thereby adding potentially hundreds of thousands more jobs to domestic industries. To learn more please visit www.jobenomics.com