Back to Work

by Bill Clinton

  44. Support National Jobs Day. On November 1, 2011, a group of business leaders urged the more than one million companies with fifty or more employees to hire just one unemployed person. The idea was the brainchild of Jerry Jones, chief legal officer of Acxiom. The objective is to get at least a million people hired by Thanksgiving. Jones argues that it is in the business community’s interest to create more consumers, that companies with more than fifty employees can afford to do it, and that putting a million people to work might change the prevailing negative psychology enough to spark even more hiring. This is one of those ideas that sounds too good to be true but may just be true.

  45. Offer an X Prize or its equivalent for ideas that promote innovation and job creation. Every day, the press and blog sites carry new ideas their proponents claim will create lots of jobs. In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler argued that freeing up the unused and underutilized spectrum, including that which is government owned, could “create a million new jobs, not to mention new devices and apps not thought possible in our bandwidth-starved world—phones that work in elevators and subways, remote auto and medical diagnostics, real-time ads on smart phones and other devices . . . and that’s just in the first six months.” I don’t know if he’s right, but it’s worth testing.

  The X PRIZE Foundation runs large-scale competitions with generous prizes for ideas that lead to products worth more than the prize itself. For example, it’s offered prizes for the development of a car that gets a hundred miles per gallon and for commercially viable space travel. It’s independent of both the government and private interest groups, and wealthy individuals could be recruited to fund the prizes. I’d like to see them awarded on a sliding scale based on the number of jobs created, with a ten-thousand-job minimum. If the X PRIZE Foundation won’t do it, someone will. This would be a great commitment for the Clinton Global Initiative.

  46. Replicate the prosperity centers. Earlier in the book I described the prosperity center built around computer simulation in the Orlando area. The cooperative synergies of Disney’s and Universal’s theme parks, Electronic Arts’ video games division, Defense Department and NASA training programs, and the University of Central Florida’s education, training, research, and technology-transfer capacity have attracted more than one hundred other companies involved in simulation work, from corporate giants like Lockheed Martin to small start-ups with big dreams.

  I first read about Orlando’s unique cluster in The Next American Economy by William J. Holstein. The book tells a lot of other success stories. MIT’s well-run technology-transfer program, plus a $100,000 Small Business Innovation grant from the SBA, helped start a remarkable new battery company called A123 Systems, which now has more than sixteen hundred employees in the United States and Asia and is building a new battery factory in Michigan to employ hundreds more.

  In 1980, Congress authorized universities to transfer technology developed with federal research money to the private sector. Virtually all of them look for opportunities to do so and to make money doing it. A young relative of mine does this work for Texas A&M and is involved in some exciting projects. But MIT’s system is arguably the best in the country. They don’t charge new companies anything up front. Instead, they take stock in the new companies and hope for big returns if their technology proves profitable. It’s a model other universities should be encouraged to adopt.

  In Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University is helping the city of steel become the city of advanced robotics, with more than thirty new companies already up and running, many with support from the Defense Department, NASA, and private companies like Boeing.

  San Diego now has more winners of Nobel Prizes in the sciences than any other American city as the capital of America’s genomics industry, beginning with the work of the biotech legend Craig Venter and the commitment of the University of California at San Diego to build a world-class supercomputing center. Thanks to the wireless communications pioneer Irwin Jacobs’s company, Qualcomm, San Diego is also home to seven hundred or so wireless communications firms and is now building one of the top wireless health centers in the United States.

  There are lots of other stories in Holstein’s book that will encourage you to believe in America’s capacity to create good jobs: how Corning innovated internally to develop Gorilla Glass to replace the easy-to-shatter plastic on cell phones; how Austin, Texas, is mobilizing to create a smart power grid with more solar and wind power in the hands of individual citizens and businesses who can sell what they don’t use back to the grid; how North Carolina is organizing to increase the number of small- and medium-sized businesses that export; how Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Community College has been especially successful in retraining older unemployed workers for good jobs that are available; how Georgia is bringing lost manufacturing jobs back to the United States; and, of course, how Silicon Valley is booming again.

  In July 2011, Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to make New York City “the technology capital of the United States, and the world,” offering land and $100 million in infrastructure upgrades to any university, educational institution, or consortium to build a science and engineering campus on Governors Island, Roosevelt Island, or the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There are already a lot of universities in the city. I hope they’ll offer a joint proposal, plus a plan to transfer their discoveries to start-ups in return for an ownership share, as MIT does. There also needs to be a fund to provide seed capital to start-ups. New York could then rival Silicon Valley and tech communities all over the world as a prosperity cluster.

  The Startup Foundation is hosting summits all over America to identify the opportunities in and obstacles to establishing entrepreneurial ecosystems. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo has organized a competition for development funds among ten regional economic clusters. It is modeled on the Federal Empowerment Zone program and requires leaders within each region to work together to develop ambitious but achievable development plans.

  The federal government should increase support for these and other new innovation centers and encourage all states and large metropolitan areas to develop them.

  In an August 31, 2011, article in USA Today, Michigan’s former governor Jennifer Granholm and Daniel Mulhern suggested, as I have, repatriating offshore earnings of American corporations at the 15 percent capital gains rate and using a lot of the money to fund a “Jobs Race to the Top,” modeled on the Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, in which effective public-private partnerships would compete for grants and no-interest loans. It’s a good idea.

  These kinds of innovation clusters can spring up everywhere in America. They’re models of freedom, creativity, and cooperation. Innovators, entrepreneurs, patient investors, venture capitalists, established companies, private foundations, universities, community colleges, and federal and state agencies work together in ways that create jobs, good incomes, and wealth.

  In other words, made-in-America prosperity looks nothing like the food fight in Washington. Its hallmark is cooperation, not conflict. The private sector views its public sector partners as indispensable allies, not the tax-grabbing, wealth-robbing predators of antigovernment mythology. When you’re actually trying to create new businesses, new jobs, and new wealth, you do what works.

  We all need to do what works. And we don’t have a day or a dollar to waste.

  * * *

  1 Ireland has lost a lot of its good jobs since the crash, because its banks were among the most highly leveraged in Europe. Once the Irish work through the debt overhang, they’ll be highly competitive again.

  2 There’s one big roadblock to this proposal. The Joint Committee on Taxation will “score” repatriation as costing $80 billion in revenues, even though we’re the only OECD country still taxing overseas income. Under the budget agreement the administration would have to come up with $80 billion of further cuts to gain far less than that to seed the infrastructure bank. If this unrealistic position can’t be cha
nged, Congress must complete the corporate tax reform as soon as possible.

  3 If you want more information, check out Google.org’s The Impact of Clean Energy Innovation.

  4 This is an idea I first heard suggested by Newt Gingrich.

  EPILOGUE

  Time to Choose

  WHAT KIND OF FUTURE DO WE want? Do we want a country where we work together to restore the American Dream and rebuild the middle class? What’s the smart, effective way to do that? With a strong economy and a strong government working together to advance shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity? Or with a weak government and powerful interest groups who scorn shared prosperity in favor of winner take all until it’s all gone? That’s really where antigovernment, “you’re on your own” policies will lead us.

  If we want a future of shared prosperity, where the middle class is growing and poverty is declining, where the American Dream is alive and well, and where the United States remains the leading force for peace and prosperity in a highly competitive world, we’ve got a lot to do, and we need to get moving.

  Everywhere we look, across the world and within the United States, prosperity is produced by networks of people committed to productive investment over unaffordable consumption, to creative cooperation over constant conflict.

  It won’t be easy to create a prosperity environment everywhere in America, not only because conditions and resources vary so much, but also because thirty years of bipolar antigovernment politics have given us a severe case of collective attention deficit disorder. We respond predictably to the same old adrenaline shots from politicians and pundits. We don’t much like being around, listening to, or learning from people who disagree with us. And we worry that our best days may be behind us.

  They may be. But they don’t have to be.

  When a lifelong Democrat, Bill Bishop, can write in his book, The Big Sort, that he misses his talks and arguments with his only Republican neighbor, who moved across town in Austin to a heavily Republican area because, except for Bishop, his Democratic neighbors made him feel uncomfortable, there’s hope.

  When a lifelong Republican, John Bogle, who pioneered the indexed mutual fund, can write in his book Enough that the financial sector has taken too much out of the American economy by focusing on high-dollar transactions that have large fees but make no contribution to the growth of companies or employment, then join other successful Republicans and Democrats in proposing drastic changes to reduce the obsession of Wall Street and corporate America with “short-termism,” there’s hope.1

  As long as Americans by the thousands keep lining up for every open job, and young (and not so young) people keep coming up with good ideas, there’s hope.

  To turn that hope into positive changes, Americans in all walks of life have to muster the confidence, common sense, and creative imagination to get our country out of its economic and political rut and back onto the road to the future.

  In a Gallup poll in the spring of 2011, fewer than half of Americans surveyed believed the current generation of young adults will have a better life than their parents. An August 14, 2011, article in the Los Angeles Times titled “Generation Vexed: Young Americans Rein in Their Dreams” documented how young people are altering their career plans, putting off marriage, and downsizing their dreams.

  I can understand the pessimism of the young. After all, we’ve been mired in the current mess for a significant portion of their lives. But giving up is not a strategy for success. Downsizing budgets may be necessary, but downsizing dreams is a decision to be disappointed.

  There is one thing we can’t change. We are rapidly becoming more and more enmeshed in an interdependent world, one with more rising economic powers and more widely dispersed political influence. Anybody who was thinking about it on the day the Berlin Wall fell realized then that America had become the world’s sole economic, political, and military superpower but that it couldn’t last very long. If you believe that intelligence and effort are equally distributed, then you shouldn’t begrudge the fact that our interdependent world is bound to give more people in other nations the chance to claim their dreams, more nations a chance to rise or to reinvent themselves and rise again. And if you really believe in freedom and free markets, you shouldn’t complain about the competition but learn from it.

  In this new, multipolar world, we can still be the world’s best innovator; the world’s best producer of new products and services; the world’s best assimilator of people from every nation, race, religion, and culture; and the world’s best example of shared opportunity and responsibility, demonstrating the power of both individual freedom and close cooperation and proving both the genius of free markets and the necessity of active government.

  Success in the twenty-first-century world requires Americans to be curious enough to learn from countries that are doing important things better than we are, humble enough to listen and to learn from Americans who disagree with us, smart enough to realize that shared prosperity is a better formula for success and happiness than “you’re on your own,” and big enough to admit we’re all going to be wrong once in a while. (If you want to feel better about not being perfect and see the potential upside in your errors, read Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz.)

  We’re in a mess now. At the dawn of the new century, after years of strong job growth, rising incomes, and declining debt, we abandoned a proven path to shared prosperity in favor of doubling down, once more, on antigovernment ideology. Now we’re paying for it. The only sensible thing to do is for all of us to take some responsibility for changing things. The world is moving on, and if we want to stop falling behind, we have to get back in the game. Let’s ditch the stale certainty of ideology and bring our values, ideas, experiences, and dreams to a real debate about the future. Think how exciting it would be if all of us—Democrats, Republicans, and independents, conservatives, liberals, progressives, and libertarians—had real arguments based on real facts that produced real results through principled compromise based on what works.

  I don’t know how this will turn out. I just know that for more than two hundred years, everyone who’s bet against the United States has lost. A lot of people are betting against us today. I’m betting that once again, in a very different world, we’ll find our way to a “more perfect Union.” Let’s get the show on the road.

  * * *

  1 A report by the Aspen Institute, Overcoming Short-termism: A Call for a More Responsible Approach to Investment and Business Management, is really worth reading, for the sweep and the specificity of its bipartisan proposals to reform the financial sector to create more jobs and long-term value, including a tax on financial transactions that has bipartisan business support. See http://www.aspeninstitute.org/​sites/​default/​files/​content/​images/​Overcoming%20Short-termism%20AspenCVSG%2015dec09.pdf.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AS IN THE WRITING of My Life and Giving, I am most indebted to Justin Cooper for helping me gather and organize materials, doing extra research, fact-checking, and correcting errors, and working with me to make the book clearer as I wrote and rewrote it. Justin was assisted with fact-checking in the final weeks by Betsy McManus and Caitlin Klevorick.

  My editor, Bob Gottlieb, and managing editor, Katherine Hourigan, were, as always, invaluable in making sure that in substance and style the book would be interesting and useful to all kinds of readers.

  I am also grateful to others at Knopf for their support. Sonny Mehta, chairman and editor in chief; Tony Chirico, president; Carol Carson, Maria Massey, Jessica Freeman-Slade, Andy Hughes, Virginia Tan, and the many others who did the proofreading and put the book together in record time.

  I want to thank all those who read all or part of the book and offered suggestions, beginning with Hillary, Chelsea, my lawyer Bob Barnett, Doug Band, Oscar Flores, Rolando Gonzalez-Bunster, Bruce Lindsey, Terry McAuliffe, John Podesta, Matt McKenna, and Mark Weiner.

  I am indebted to the many people who pro
vided information and insight on the mortgage crisis, the corporate tax reform system, and other issues and ideas discussed in the book.

  While I was writing this book, the work of my foundation, presidential library and center, the school of public service, the Clinton Global Initiative, and our work in Haiti continued, thanks to the efforts of the many good people who work in those areas. I am profoundly grateful to all of them. I want to especially thank Laura Graham, my chief of staff and representative in all our Haiti efforts; Ginny Erlich, who leads the Alliance for a Healthier Generation; Bob Harrison and the staff of CGI; Ira Magaziner and the staff of CHAI; Ami Desai, my foreign-policy aide and liaison to the Clinton Climate Initiative.

  Finally, I want to thank those who make the work I do today possible with their donations of time and money. They span the political spectrum, all income and age groups, and live all over America and across the world. Every day, they prove cooperation works better than conflict.

  PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material.

  The charts on 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 5.3, and 5.7 are © 2011 New York Times. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited.