The Answer to Our Ballooning Federal Deficit

By Jeffrey Katz

In my new book, The Secret Life: A Book of Wisdom, I write that the highest level of charity is to teach a person to fish, not to hand out fish: the common-sense principle of making people self-sufficient. So, why, in America, with an economy now producing millions of new jobs, do we not have a strong bipartisan federal policy promoting a massive federal jobs retraining program? The answer to our ballooning federal deficit is increased productivity, by getting people off government assistance and into productive, good jobs. So, why is this not happening? Sadly, it is because there is no coalition or consensus in our country for a national policy of putting our citizens back to work through retraining.

We really have three major political camps in this country, not two as is commonly thought: 1) Socialist Utopians whose objective is the broad redistribution of the existing wealth in our country. Their focus is on increasing entitlements, not jobs re-training; 2) the Establishment/Chamber of Commerce camp, which consists of the pro-big business establishments of both the Democratic and Republican Parties. This camp is primarily interested in attracting cheap foreign labor, not in retraining Americans for jobs; and 3) the so-called Americanists, who view themselves as old-fashioned patriots. They are largely supporters of the president and would get behind a jobs-retraining program; but because they are basically the only ones, we don’t see it.