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I always take note of quotes such as, "the economy has continued to lose jobs," "the economy isn't creating enough well-paying jobs," etc., because they illustrate a fundamental flaw in this country's thinking when it comes to issues related to jobs and employment.

"The economy" doesn't create any jobs -- it never has, and it never will. Companies and individuals create jobs. If there is a "lack of jobs" in this country, then the best way the address the situation is to sit down with a bunch of potential employers and ask them what keeps them from hiring additional employees right here in the U.S. From my experience, the answers in most cases will have nothing to do with "cheap Third World labor" or anything of that sort -- India and China simply serve as convenient targets for people who don't want to address the real impediments to job growth:

Consider these answers that I would provide to such a question -- and I serve as an excellent case in point because I have never been in a position where "outsourcing labor" was an option:

1. Infrastructure costs. For one of our offices, we are operating at nearly 100% capacity and could easily add several additional employees. But the incremental cost of acquiring additional space for that office is enormous; we would either have to pay very high rent on the larger space (the high rent makes me wonder just how much of the "lost jobs" story is true to begin with -- one would think that office rents would decline as more space becomes available due to layoffs, etc.), or we would have to give up our location in close proximity to a number of our best clients (in which case the need for additional employees might disappear anyway).

2. The cost of training new employees is very high. The basic problem I face is that hiring a new employee is pretty much an adventure, because the credentials they have acquired don't really tell me anything about what they know. The system of higher education in this country has reached a point where my best employee is a high school graduate, and the ones with the most credentials (graduate degrees, etc.) are often the least productive and least flexible.

3. Let's face it -- Hiring employees is a major pain in the @ss. Payroll taxes, insurance paperwork, administrative nonsense, etc. add an enormous cost to the company above and beyond their direct salaries. I read somewhere that payroll taxes and administrative overhead costs in France add $40,000 per year to a typical $40,000/year employee's salary. We aren't there yet, but there's no doubt in my mind that we draw closer to that figure by the day.

Excellent post. We've discussed this before. That's why my company hires temps, then transitions the good ones into permanent hires.

Secondly, the best thing we can do as a country is reduce the barriers to job creation here in the U.S. We will never be able to 'level the playing field' when Chinese manufacturers pay 29 cents an hour with no unions and little safety enforcement.

We need tort reform (would help drive down health care costs, and allow creative people to more easily start businesses), we need looser regulation of business, and we need smaller government/entitlements. BTW, I wouldn't want to be the employee of an actual union. The writing is on the wall, so to speak.

"The economy" doesn't create any jobs -- it never has, and it never will. Companies and individuals create jobs.

Yes, there are no such thing as the forest, only individual trees exist. There is no such thing as species - only individual organisms which for some strange reason can interact and procreate. You do not have a body - there are only billions of cells who happened to be clustered together. Even the Earth does not exist - big association of atoms is what we have, what do I say - not atoms but elementary particles or quarks.

Free market does not need any outside interference or claim, it will do fine withour public roads, without public army and police, without public currency etc ... Free market is self-sufficient god.