9. Jobs for All Americans

From http://www.the99declaration.org/jobs_for_all_americans

"Passage of a comprehensive jobs and job-training act like the American Jobs Act to employ our citizens in jobs that are available with specialized re-training through partnerships between companies seeking employees and community colleges and other educational institutions.

The American People must be put to work now by repairing America’s crumbling infrastructure and building other needed public works projects. These jobs should not be outsourced with cheap foreign labor or using foreign building materials. In conjunction with a new jobs act, re-institution of the Works Progress Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps and similar emergency governmental agencies tasked with creating new projects to provide jobs for the families of the 151 million People living in poverty and low income homes.

Astonishingly, one in four children are living in poverty in the United States while 8.3% of American adults are unemployed and 16% are underemployed. Many others have simply given up looking for work. Special tax incentives should be granted to companies who partner with educational institutions to re-train workers to work in green energy and new sources of American manufacturing to reduce reliance on imported goods and services. A democracy simply cannot survive with more than half of its population struggling to acquire basic needs such as food, shelter, education and health care, a shrinking middle class and a tiny fraction of the population controlling the media and the political process.  This is a dangerous convergence of circumstances."

First off, we will never have "jobs for all Americans." There will always be people who choose not to work or who are unable to work. Because of prejudices, it's incredibly difficult to take someone from the street and put them to work -- they don't look right, there are large gaps in their work history (if they have one), they may not even have the proper documentation (most jobs require a social security card at the bare minimum). So this isn't as simple as "just train people to work."
So, this really should say "significantly reduce actual unemployment numbers." That's fine. We can work with that.

I would agree that training programs can be a part of the plan, but I disagree with specifying what that training should be in. Green energy is nice, American manufacturing is nice, infrastructure repair is nice, but there are plenty of other things that people could -- and should -- be doing. Helping people train for any career is a good thing.

Giving companies incentives to hire could work, but how? If you hand them some cash and say "go hire some folks," there's no guarantee that they will use that money for hiring. They could, on paper, use that money to cover their HR budget, use the money saved there on whatever else they feel like, and say "well, we had to pay HR to find candidates," and technically they used the money for hiring.
We could hand companies cash for every new hire, but that could easily open the door for a revolving pool of do-nothing jobs. Hire ten people, sit them in a room for a week staring at each other, collect a thousand bucks per person, pay them 300, and send them on their way. Repeat forever.
The biggest tool in the government's arsenal here is taxation. Corporations love tax breaks. So we could hike their taxes, but give them tax breaks for new hires. Again, that could cause that revolving pool, so maybe we do tax breaks per employee instead. But then the bigger the corporation is, the less it pays in taxes. So now we've just killed small businesses.

I'm not sure that we really can cause job growth through a government mandate. It's a nice idea, but I'm not seeing anything that's actually going to work, other than direct employment. That's fine, but it means even more government expenditures. I don't see that being a very viable option at the moment.

I would say that we help people get training for their next career, but focus mainly on fixing the economy as a whole. A lot of the other points on the list will help with that. So, let's get the economy back on track, and the jobs will follow.