Don't understand conservatives? Read Bill Clinton's economic plans

Newsweek had an interesting article by Bill Clinton, former US President, on his 14 ideas on how to get the economy moving again.

If you follow US politics, or watch the Daily Show or Real Time with Bill Maher, you probably ponder why anyone in America has any interest in the Conservative Party (who seem to embrace a trickle down economic, small government approach to almost every problem facing society).

The article by Bill Clinton, I think, sheds some light on why the Republican Party, despite it's refusal to evolve with the times (and the mess Bush created) continues to resonate with a percentage of Americans.

I mean, I found Clinton's article kind of scary. He's a smart guy, but the 14 ideas he put forward were ridiculous. Things like 'paint the rooftops white to lower utility costs', the logic being as businesses opex costs decline they will use those savings to create jobs. Or how about...

11. TEACH SKILLS WE NEED

I’m trying to figure out why job seekers don’t have the skills companies need; why the community colleges and vocational programs, which have done such a great job for America, are not providing more people with the skills to fill these vacancies. Do people just not enroll in the right programs or do they drop out because of the economy? I hope we can find out.

Really? Try the problem is the opposite. For every job opening there are tons of qualified candidates. Since around 2000 (if not prior) companies, as a result of the glut of labor in the market (resulting from baby boomers and their kids all being in the workforce at the same time) we saw a unique phenomena - companies basically stopped recruiting 'interns'.

The model of nurturing talent along, that a new hire fresh out of school was an investment in your business over the long run, was officially dead. If you didn't have the exact experience the company was looking for, they had little-to-no interest in you.

Hence, because it became so hard to get in the door, we saw students go back to school to do their Masters (or many of them simply started a new degree and abandoned what they originally studied - there's been a huge knowledge capital loss in North America if you ask me, people simpy abandoning what they spent tens-of-thousands of dollars becoming proficient at - not because their skills aren't needed, but because the supply and demand in the market was messed up).

Anyway, when Democrats take good ideas but foolishly put them out there as magical cures when they aren't (Clinton's ideas would barely make a dent in the economy if you ask me) they push people towards the Republican Party (which doesn't really have any ideas other than get out of the way and let the private sector figure things out).

So that's why there are still people loyal to the Republicans, because the Democrats put forward solutions that are more whimsical than pratical.

Want to fix the economy, here's the things I'd do:

Actually I started writing what I'd do, but it was a waste of time. The reality is that there isn't anything anyone can really do because too many things are broken.

1) Universities - they pump out grads without any system in place for finding them jobs. They have no co-op models and aren't integrated with the skills-demands of the market. 

2)  Entrepreneurship - there are so many 'too big to fail' companies now that the ecosystem of innovation is dying. When you get too many great white sharks at the top of the food chain, they eat up all the food, depleting lower levels of the food chain, until they themselves eventually find themselves with nothing to eat (and voila, you get folks like the banks doing insane things to create more profit (ie. food) and you get a major recession / depression / stagflation). 

3) Debt - every American owes approximately $43,000. That's just on the governments debt. It's scary to think what it would be if you factored in corporate debt (which if a company goes into bankruptcy is absorbed throughout the economic food chain). If you layer on existing debt individual Americans already have it boggles the mind. If you discount all the babies, teenagers and retired people, I bet the actually debt per working adult American is more like $80,000 (just on the gov debt), probably $150,000 (gov + corporate debt if it were offloaded on to the system) and probably $200,000+ if you bring in personal debt (especially have the housing bubble burst). 

So how do you get every tax-paying american to cough up at least 80,000 bucks? You can't. You can raise taxes, but that just covers the interest on the 80,000 bucks. You could cut, but there's nothing you can cut that would actually pay off the debt (all it would do is curb the rate at which the debt climbs).

So all you can do is what they are doing, which is print more money, thereby reducing the 'value' of a dollar and thereby reducing what 80,000 bucks actually means (of course you cause inflation as a result and a loaf of bread suddenly costs 10 bucks, but hey, that's life). 

So you manage the debt by weakening your dollar and offloading the cost into standard of living trade-offs (ie. people's money buys them less).

Anyway, these and other reasons are why the economy is not bouncing back. Because the things that were broken are still broken. The credit cards are still maxed out and b2b and c2b spending is still stagnant. Corporations, being smart, continue to hoard cash in response to this environment. 

So I don't know how you fix this and I think as time goes on it's becoming clear that no one does. 

Everyone is just hoping that at some point something triggers a growth cycle and increased economic activity then translates into tax dollars which can be used to pay down the debt (and I'm pretty sure painting rooftops isn't going to be the thing that does that). Decline in unemployment was to be the signal that this process was starting, yet unemployment is not declining, which is about as bad a sign as you can get. 

Innovation is the key. New industries, new products, these are the things that will create economic growth and soak up the unemployed. But that doesn't seem to be happening on a large scale. 

So I'm stumped at this point as to how things will turn around, but Clinton's article actually scared me that someone as bright as him could only offer up 14 rather silly notions for reviving America.