Here are 20 recent ideas from Center for American Progress’ policy teams to create middle-class jobs and promote an economy that works for everyone, not just the privileged few. Many of these ideas build on the ideas presented in their “Meeting the Jobs Challenge” initiative launched in 2009. Click on the links below to learn more about each proposal.
20 ways to create jobs
1. Upgrade our nation’s roads, bridges, and other basic infrastructure: 18,000 new jobs for every $1 billion invested.
2. Launch a rehab-to-rent program to turn tens of thousands of government-owned foreclosed homes into affordable rental housing, stabilize neighborhoods, and put construction workers back on the job: 20,000 new jobs a year.
3. Implement new EPA rules governing toxic emissions from power plants: 40,000 new direct jobs.
4. Protect health care reform, which will reduce health insurance premiums, expand coverage, and create jobs: 250,000 to 400,000 new jobs a year for the next decade.
5. Retrofit for energy efficiency just 40 percent of the nation’s residential and commercial building stock and unleash massive demand for domestic labor: more than 625,000 new jobs over a decade.
6. Extend emergency unemployment benefits to long-term unemployed workers hurt by the economic downturn: more than 700,000 jobs.
7. Expand the payroll tax cut for employees and extend it to employers through 2012: more than 1 million jobs.
8. Extend national service programs to provide young people with full-time positions in AmeriCorps, VISTA, YouthBuild, and the youth service and conservation corps: 60,000 new jobs.
9. Pass Home Star, Building Star, and Rural Star legislation to make homes and buildings energy efficient while supporting the hard-hit construction industry: 250,000 new jobs a year.
10. Reduce the nation’s dropout rate by half to add $9.6 billion in economic growth and $713 million in increased tax revenue: 54,000 new jobs.
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