Creating Jobs at Home in a Worldwide Market

Re “Bush’s Call for Job Training: Cruel Joke on Unemployed,” Commentary, Jan. 25: The three suggestions professor Gordon Lafer put forward would destroy rather than create jobs. More unionization of jobs inevitably means fewer jobs as higher wages and benefits cause employers to replace workers with machines or ship jobs overseas. Raising the minimum wage does exactly the same thing and for the same reasons.

American companies can, of course, be discouraged from laying off American workers and moving jobs overseas. Temporarily. Until far cheaper goods and services from India and China put the American companies out of business.

More people invest when returns on investment are high. More investment creates more jobs directly, and also through the purchase of plants, equipment and services.

Congress, accordingly, lowered tax rates to increase returns on investment and thus, eventually, the amount of new investment, job creation, wealth, income and tax payments.

Raymond J. Rostan

Santa Ana

*

Add the hypocritical ploy of the president’s job training idea for unemployed workers to the list of other deceitful administration policies -- such as changes in the fair labor standards that could deprive millions of workers of overtime pay, the insufficiently funded and otherwise flawed No Child Left Behind Act, tax cuts (mainly for those so wealthy they don’t need them, some of whom don’t want them) and so-called Medicare drug benefits that will be a bitter pill for seniors.

Here is a “let them eat cake” suggestion this out-of-touch administration might offer as the solution for unemployed workers, especially single mothers, worried about feeding their families and their retirement: Put your money in the stock market.

Bert Eifer

Woodland Hills