Richard Kirsch takes on the myth that what is good for the pocketbooks of major corporations is also good for jobs.

Spinmeisters for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Republican politicians like Speaker John Boehner like to call businesses "the job creators. " But what every American knows, if he or she thinks about it, is that unless you work for a small business, your boss will only create a new job if there isn't a cheaper option: force you to work longer hours, hire a temp, purchase new technology. Or if you work for a big company, get the work done overseas.

I was thinking about this after reading an article in The New York Times this past Sunday ("Companies Push for Tax Break on Foreign Cash"), which described how corporate America wants to be able to slash the taxes it pays on overseas profits that it returns to the United States from 35% to 5.25%. The corporations are selling this as job creation, saying that the billions of dollars they would bring back home will be invested in jobs. Who are they kidding? These are the same companies that are already sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash, which they clearly are not investing in jobs in the United States. What will they do with the money if they get to bring it back on the cheap? Last time the corporations convinced (translation: "paid") Congress to give them a repatriation holiday, 92% of the cash was rewarded to shareholders in the forms of dividends and stock buybacks.

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Even if they did need money to create jobs, there's little chance corporate America would locate those jobs in the United States. Apple has $12 billion in profits waiting offshore to be repatriated, but it's clear that bringing that cash home won't mean more jobs for American workers. Apple's entire U.S. workforce of 25,000 is dwarfed by the 250,000 workers who make Apple products for the Chinese company FoxConn. Apple is far from alone.  From 2005 to 2009, IBM expanded its international workforce by 100,000 while cutting 29,000 U.S. Employees. All told, U.S. multinationals cut their U.S. workforces by 2.9 million during the 2000s while adding 2.4 million employees overseas.

Last February, President Obama embarrassed himself by going to the Chamber of Commerce and pleading with corporate executives to invest some of the $2 trillion in cash in the United States. The President appealed to the Chamber to respond to forecasts of "a healthy increase in demand" and invest in job creation. He even declared to the lobbying association that had led the fights to kill his signature achievements in office - health care and financial reform - "we're in this together."

No, Mr. President, we're not in this together with corporate America. Corporations are in it to maximize profits and boost CEO salaries, not help the U.S. economy or put people back to work.

With no "healthy increase in demand," on the horizon and unemployment heading back up, the President has talked more about government-led solutions that would actually create jobs in America. Near the end of his address on Afghanistan, and in a full-throated pitch at a Democratic fundraiser in New York City the next evening, Obama called for investments in education, infrastructure, and clean energy at home.

Democratic leaders in Congress have also started to sharpen their focus on the failure of corporations to create jobs at home. Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Majority Leader Eric Cantor's walking away from budget talks was, ""Yes, we do want to remove tax subsidies for big oil, we want to remove tax breaks for corporations that send jobs overseas... "

The Republican leadership in Congress has taken investing in job creating programs and closing corporate tax loopholes off the table in the debt-ceiling negotiations. But if the President is to be reelected, he needs to make it very clear to the American people that he is doing everything he can to create good jobs at home. He should oppose budget-cuts in the debt-ceiling talks that kill jobs, including cuts in education and Medicaid. Moreover, he should insist that any debt-ceiling deal include closing corporate loopholes that encourage profits to be used overseas and invest those savings in measures to create U.S. jobs. And when Republicans charge that doing so would hurt the "job creators" he should ask Americans a simple question: "Is your boss in business to create jobs in the United States, or to make as much money as he can?

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, whose book on the campaign to win reform will be published in 2012. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

No matter how good taking on debt may feel at a young age, today's grads are being set up for disaster.

This week's credit check: Those ages 18-27 report a self-esteem boost from student loan and credit card debt. But about 9% of people ages 55-64 are still paying back student loans.

A new study recently came out that says young people get a self esteem boost from taking on debt. For those ages 18-27, its findings show, more credit card and student loan debt lead to higher self-esteem levels and a feeling of control over life. This lines up with some common sense: student debt is considered to be "good" debt, an investment in the future. And as Annie Lowrey reports, there is ample evidence that credit cards give us all the joys of consuming without the pain of spending actual money. She quotes George Lowenstein of Carnegie Mellon explaining, "Credit cards effectively anesthetize the pain of paying. You swipe the card and it doesn't feel like you're giving anything up to make the purchase, unlike paying cash where you have to hand over bills."

But the other side of the coin, the study finds, is that the self-esteem high plummets later on when the students have to start paying that debt back -- and realize how long and hard it will be to do so. For those over 28, having higher levels of debt reduced that sense of self-esteem and mastery. "By age 28, they may be realizing that they overestimated how much money they were going to earn in their jobs. When they took out the loans, they may have thought they would pay off their debts easily, and it is turning out that it is not as easy as they had hoped," one of the study's authors opined. This is unsurprising: While student loans help finance a college degree, and that does have an effect on eventual pay, the burden of paying them back often hangs around late into life. About 9% of people ages 55-64 still have student loan debt. Part of that is due to the fact that unlike most other forms of personal debt, student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy -- there's no way to get rid of them except payment.

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And those loans will linger even longer without savings -- even though young people think they are saving better than their parents. Almost half of respondents to a recent SavingsAccounts.com poll said they think as much. But as Jill Schlesinger points out, this isn't really true. "The Bureau of Economic Analysis' personal savings data indicates that the personal savings rate averaged only 3.48 percent of income over the previous 10 years, and doesn't come close to matching the 10-year average personal savings rate of 9.63 percent seen from 1971-1981." In fact, one in three adults under 33 have no savings at all. So on top of young grads being loaded to the hilt with debt burdens, they have very little stocked up to help pay it off.

They'll be even more hindered, in fact, by another aspect: they can expect lower wages than their parents. Overall, middle class wages have almost completely stagnated over the past few decades. As CNNMoney reports, "In 1988, the income of an average American taxpayer was $33,400, adjusted for inflation. Fast forward 20 years, and not much had changed: The average income was still just $33,000 in 2008, according to IRS data." On top of that trend, grads are entering an absolutely dismal job market, one that will likely have lasting effects on how much they'll earn over their lifetimes. The NYTimes writes, "The median starting salary for students graduating from four-year colleges in 2009 and 2010 was $27,000, down from $30,000 for those who entered the work force in 2006 to 2008... Among the members of the class of 2010, just 56 percent had held at least one job by this spring, when the survey was conducted. That compares with 90 percent of graduates from the classes of 2006 and 2007." And any reduction in pay now will have profound effects later. Charlie Eisenhood found that drops in initial wages due to high unemployment rates hang around: "even 15 years after college graduation, the wage loss is 2.5% and is still statistically significant," according to one study.

All in all, the short-term ego boost of student and credit card debt pales in comparison to what young people are up against in the long run. A college degree can lead to good jobs, higher pay, and of course education, but the amount of debt students are asked to take on is getting out of control. They should probably sober up for a rocky road ahead.

Bryce Covert is Assistant Editor of New Deal 2.0.

Jon Rynn continues his exploration of what a manufacturing-centered economy might look like, arguing that keeping production concentrated in smaller areas can bring wealth to all.

We often hear that a globalized economy is the best kind of economy. But could a world economy based on a set of strong regional systems, each one centered around a thriving manufacturing sector, serve us better in the long run? I argued in the first post of this series that economies are ecosystems, and that manufacturing is a necessary part of an economic ecosystem. In my second post, I proposed that manufacturing underlies economic growth, and machinery can allow us to have ecologically sustainable growth. Now I want to pursue how the innovation that underlies beneficial manufacturing growth is dependent on the close proximity of the various “niches” of the economic ecosystem, and what this means to our perception of how the global economy functions best.

Despite the rhetoric of globalization, the wealthiest economies have historically been regionally based. By “region," I mean a geographically contiguous area, separated from others by a barrier. The premiere example of this is the United States. Europe is another natural region, which has now integrated itself formally, although it was always integrated in fact. Japan, China, and India are also always considered separate economies. In fact, the regions that have the least cohesion are the poorest, such as Africa. While Africa is a natural economic region, it has been “integrated” into the world economy at great expense because its various pieces have become resource-generating appendages of wealthy, regional economies, instead of remaining parts of a manufacturing-centered, integrated African economy. The same could be said for the Middle East; Latin America is somewhere in between and is part of the global “lower middle class” as a result. The post-Soviet set of countries of central Eurasia are poorer than their oppressive predecessor partly because they are not as integrated as they used to be.

What are the advantages of operating in a contiguous geographic area? After all, according to neoclassical economic theory, an exchange is an exchange is an exchange, whether it is between a customer and a local store or WalMart and a supplier in China. The problem is that an economy is composed of both exchange and production; you have to have something produced before you can exchange it. And like an ecosystem, production relies on many sub-networks of production and exchange that require a physically close set of interactions, particularly when it comes to innovation.

Innovation can be seen as the product of three main sets of “human capital” -- scientists, engineers, and skilled production workers. Scientists create a “stock of knowledge," to use Simon Kuznets' phrase. This stock of knowledge is used by engineers, who design the machinery and processes that are used in the factories and construction sites and other sites of production. Skilled production workers then use these factories and other production centers to create the wealth that societies survive on.

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Just as it would make no sense in a natural ecosystem such as a forest to have the trees in one place, the deer that eat the leaves in another place, and the bears that eat the deer in yet a third place, so it makes no sense to have the scientists, engineers, and skilled production workers spread out all over the globe, with little or no interaction. It is one of the great ironies of modern economic life that the industry that is perhaps doing the most to disperse these groups, the financial industry, is so geographically concentrated that it can simply be referred to by a single street, “Wall Street." The financial industry concentrates itself for the same reason whole regions work best in a geographically bounded area: the main players can talk to each other, observe first-hand the processes that underlie their industry, and very quickly change practices as the larger environment, or ecosystem, puts pressure on the industry to change.

Engineering and research centers are now moving from the United States to China, just as factories have moved. These moves increase innovative capacity when researchers and engineers can interact with and witness first-hand the operation of machinery and factories, talk to other engineers and skilled production workers, and take advantage of the serendipity and unexpected encounters that also make cities the centers of innovation, as Jane Jacobs emphasized in her books. It isn't just within one industry that these interactions are beneficial, but also when several industries interact within a city region, as, say, publishing, fashion, and (now only some) manufacturing have in the history of New York City.

So couldn't each city region then replicate the entire set of industries? City regions aren't large enough to provide everything they need; trade is critical to production. In the US, for instance, different city regions have specialized in different industries. I mentioned New York City, but Cincinnati was known for machine tools, Pittsburgh for steel, of course Detroit for cars, and we have had Silicon Valley, an outgrowth of the San Francisco economy, as the premiere example of a center of innovation. The idea is to have a large enough area to encompass all of the various niches of an economic ecosystem, and also one that is small enough to encourage a rich network of interactions.

In order for this weaving together of city regions to occur, the government has to create a transportation network. The Interstate Highway System served this purpose after World War II, as the railroad system did before (and as I have argued, probably will again sometime in the future). A communications network is also necessary, again generally either run by governments or supported by them.

Governments have historically also protected their territories economically and militarily in order to allow these regional production networks to grow to the point where they can compete globally. When governments bind together areas in this way, the regional economy becomes strong enough that global trade is actually increased. You need a world class production system before you can trade manufactured products, and governments have historically been a crucial builder of those regional economies -- as I shall argue in my next post. On the other hand, when a country like the United States allows its manufacturing base to be exported, it will open up yawning trade deficits, and eventually, slide into poverty. The choice is ours.

Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science and is a Visiting Scholar at the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems.

There is a new, successful family model that combines marriage and work -- but only for the middle class.

A new study of newlyweds found that increases in workloads were associated with increases in marital satisfaction for both men and women.  The researchers expected this to change when the newlyweds became parents, and indeed it did -- for men. For women who became parents, however, increases in the amount of time and energy they devoted to work were associated with increases in their marital satisfaction. The authors speculated that, once they become parents, husbands and wives might respond differently to changes in each other's workloads; fathers might spend more time on childcare when their wives face high demands at work.

This is important information for those of us trying to balance work and family. On the other hand, increasing numbers of people in the United States are neither married nor employed. Family structure has become a marker of class, and studies can cloak profound differences among different types of families. Unpacking this research requires reconsideration of the relationship between work, marriage, and class. First, limiting the examination to married mothers skews the study from the outset. The most elite women, as measured by education, have become the most likely to marry, a reversal of historical trends.

Second, the most elite women have become the most likely to work. According to 2007 Census Bureau data, only about 26 percent of mothers with a college degree stay home with their children, while more than 40 percent of mothers lacking high school diplomas are full-time homemakers. College educated women are more successful in combining work and family than other groups in part because they tend to have the resources to pay for child care and other help, and because they are more likely to have flexible positions with more generous family leave policies.

Third, the best educated women have also become more likely to have partners who help with the children. Unsurprisingly, married fathers contribute more to child care than unmarried fathers, but even among the married, fathers who are college graduates contribute more than those without college degrees. Indeed, since the start of the Great Recession, the only group of women whose fertility rates have increased are those with graduate degrees, but only if the men in their lives assist.

For the college educated middle class, therefore, this study gets it right. It confirms the results of Penn State sociologist Paul Amato's in-depth comparison of the changes in family life between 1980 and 2000. Amato shows that over the last twenty years it is well educated, two-career families that have experienced the greatest gains in family stability. For two-career couples, women's workforce participation brings greater income and marital quality, along with greater pressure on men to help with the children.

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Amato found, however, that the same did not hold true for working class wives. The marital quality of  couples in financial distress dropped significantly during the same twenty year period. This was in large part because women in less satisfying jobs who preferred to be home with the children have increasingly found that they have to work because their husbands cannot support them. More recent studies confirm that unemployed men, in contrast with both unemployed women and men with stable jobs, are less likely to help with either the children or the house, increasing their partners' unhappiness.

The new study, by focusing on newlyweds, largely misses these effects. There is a new, successful family model that combines marriage, childbearing and workforce participation. It incorporates a more egalitarian division of work and family roles. It produces higher rates of income and marital satisfaction. It also, however, requires investment in men and women's education -- and it is increasingly beyond the reach of large portions of the public.

This study fails to show the class based increases in employment instability -- instability that in the long run discourages marriage and contributes to family instability. The fact that the middle class is successfully combining work and family roles says little about those for whom both work and marriage are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. While the Great Recession has at least temporarily decreased divorce rates, it has also lowered marriage rates. Any focus on newlyweds therefore is likely to include only those who can marry, and that overwhelmingly means the better educated with the best jobs. For the rest of the country, the prospects for marriage and jobs remain bleak -- so news about how to manage the tensions between work and family are not comforting.

June Carbone is the Edward A. Smith/Missouri Chair of Law, the Constitution and Society at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Naomi Cahn is the John Theodore Fey Research Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School. She is the author of numerous books and law review articles on gender and family law.

Cahn and Carbone are the co-authors of Red Families v. Blue Families.