But if it is about creating jobs, which was the number one issue for the 2010 elections, why would large multinationals that do at least 50 percent of their business overseas, need to create jobs here?
They have to worry about unions, the environment, other federal rules and regulations that impede, if not slow, their path to profitability.
In other nations that American companies do business in, they tend not to worry as much not only about the aforementioned factors, they can also cut deals with corrupt politicians and other stakeholders there.
That is what happened with the tragedy at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, in the 80s, as an example.
More recently, even Apple had to renegotiate pay issues, with one of their outsourced businesses in China, given a high rate of suicide there.
While it is government’s job to create an environment for business to create jobs, I would contend that the so-called environment that the government creates here in the U.S. will never be satisfactory enough for large firms because they can always get a better deal elsewhere. This is accomplished by skirting domestic laws in trading partners nations and no one (well, not most) is suggesting that everything be torn down so that the U.S. will look like a third world nation in the institutions that it has built over the decades.
There is still, of course, the potential to rake in profits here in the U.S. and they get to do that by lobbying politicians, both Democratic and Republican, to ease regulations in the financial industry, for instance.
President Bill Clinton, until recently, was still defending his deregulation record and the use of derivatives as a necessary tool in the corporate world, even if derivatives have been proven to cause price increases in goods.
On the jobs summit itself, ask yourself the question (if you have a business, large or small) if you would like to disclose your plans, even general in nature, to your competitors, the government and the public at large? I would not.
So what is the point of a jobs summit if it is not a photo-op for 2012? But one thing the president can do is to follow through on his promise of reworking the tax code and making it simpler so that corporations and individuals, while paying a lower rate, will not be allowed deductions and exemptions that cause the Treasury to bleed revenues.
So on the one hand, there is the Fed with the ultra-loose monetary policy and the federal government with a simpler, fairer tax code that encourages investment and, hopefully, job creation.
MATT PHILLIPS
Mangilao, Guam
