California's unemployment rate is at 11.7 percent.

President Barack Obama and today's economists do not see any quick solutions to bringing down the staggering numbers. Obama met with The Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in Durham, N.C. on June 13. The organization proposed some actions that it said could create over a million jobs without major legislation from Congress. 

One of the new jobs-related effort Obama revealed at the meeting is working with the council. 

We spoke with a senior economist for the Coalition for a Prosperous America and author of Free Trade Doesn't Work Ian Fletcher about the feasibility of the Council's five solutions.

Neon Tommy: What do you think about the first proposal to form business partnerships with community colleges to train workers for jobs available today?

Ian Fletcher:  Job training is good in the long run. The idea that it's going to solve anything in the short run – that is within one or two years timeframe – is false because there aren't any jobs to train people for. There's no point in training people for jobs that aren't there.

NT: What about the proposal to streamline permitting processes to speed up construction projects?

IF:  I think it's a good solution when the delay is being imposed on construction projects, like due to purely bureaucratic constraints or due to inappropriate regulations. I think it's a bad idea if you are talking about getting rid of any of the zoning or safety constraints, which are quite deliberately part of the permitting process, so that buildings don't get put up which are harmful to the people who live and work in them or to the surrounding communities. We have these rules for a reason, a lot of them.

NT: Would making it easier for foreign tourists to obtain visas to travel to the U.S. and assist in any way?

IF:  That's a silly idea because it's just not that hard to get a visa to come to the United States, unless you are from, you know, North Korea or Iraq or, you know, some country like that.

NT: Another solution is to help small employers obtain loans. What is the issue with this idea?

IF:  The big problem with this idea, like a lot of these ideas, is that what's constraining small businesses and indeed the corporate sector generally is not a lack of credit, it's a lack of demand. The Feds have pushed short-term interest rates down to historic lows without stimulating the economy very much because nobody wants to borrow money to invest when there's no demand to make a product that they would end up making. You're not going to expand without customers to buy what you make.”

NT: And the last solution is to upgrade commercial and government buildings (The Better Buildings Initiative) for energy efficiency. Is this a good solution?

IF:  Upgrading government buildings for energy efficiency and in indeed upgrading any building regardless of who it belongs to is obviously a good idea in the long run. But, in terms of short term stimulus, that's not necessarily the best infrastructure project to put our money into. There's a lot of other infrastructure needs that I think would come up in front of that.

NT: Do you have any short-term ideas on how to improve the state's unemployment crisis? 

IF:  Well, the first point to be made is, as much as I love California and live here, the unemployment problems of the U.S. are problems of the national economy as a whole. There's no California-specific unemployment crisis like there was in the early '90s, when we had radical cutbacks in the defense sector in Southern California due to the end of the Cold War. That was California-specific; this situation is not. It gels with what I have consistently said for years now – the big hole in the American economy, unemployment-wise, is the trade deficit. That is, as long as America continues to import vastly more goods than we export, we lose far more jobs to imports than we gain through exports. So doing something to rebalance America's trade would have a good effect. 

NT: Does the state's budget and debt impact its high unemployment rate? 

IF: Look, obviously everything at the end of the day in economics is in some way connected to everything else. There's no question that the California budget situation does not exactly inspire confidence on the part of businesses considering their future plans in the state. However, state budget is a relatively small part of the picture; the federal budget plays a much bigger picture. And, businesses are far more concerned with things like if there are demands for the product or service I produce than issues of whether Sacramento is gonna produce a decent state budget or not. Have that be the factor. 

NT: When do you expect to see a decrease in the unemployment rate?

IF:  Right now, the U.S. is not on the trajectory for unemployment to go down. It just isn't. And it's going to have to be some kind of fundamental shift before that's going to happen.

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