More than just another pretty face here's the Dilbert blog:
If you're looking for a job, the best asset at your disposal is who you
know. Your personal network of friends, families, alumni, and past work
associates is extraordinarily valuable. Those are the people you turn to
for your job leads, career advice, and sometimes even start-up funding.
Most careers grow out of personal connections. But once you get the
career you want, your personal network instantly becomes a semi-stranded
asset. It's nice to have it waiting for you if you need it later, but
during the dormant time it does you little good. My idea for today
involves a way to monetize your personal network and reduce unemployment
at the same time.
My key assumption is that the long-term
unemployed have relatively ineffective personal networks. This is
obviously a gross generalization, but I think it is close enough for my
purposes. Stated simply, rich people usually have valuable friends (in
economic terms) and unemployed people often don't.
Suppose the
federal government creates a plan in which any citizen in a high tax
bracket can volunteer to mentor a person who has been unemployed for one
year or more. To start, the government would randomly assign a local
unemployed person to each mentor. The deal would be that if the mentor
can find a job for the unemployed person, the mentor's own taxes would
be reduced by the amount of taxes paid by the newly hired person over
five years. I'll include payroll taxes in the calculation because many
employed people don't pay federal income taxes. Serial mentoring would
be allowed too, so one mentor could help find work for multiple
unemployed people, one at a time.
We want to keep the government
bureaucracy to a minimum, and keep freedom to a maximum, so let's assume
the entire program is optional for all participants, and the mentors
fill out simple tax forms once a year that list the Social Security
number of the unemployed person, a log of what steps were taken to help
him/her find work, and the date of employment. It's about the same
amount of paperwork you might do to claim a home office deduction. And
it would carry the same penalties for lying to the IRS. All the
government needs is the Social Security numbers of both the mentor and
the newly employed person in order to keep track of taxes paid and tax
credits given.
In theory, getting more people working will
stimulate the economy enough to compensate the national treasury many
times over for the tax benefits given to the mentors. The newly employed
will be buying more goods and services and they won't be a drain on
unemployment insurance and social services. Everyone wins.
To make this plan work - and this is probably the most important part -
you also need some sort of online system where mentors can "trade" their
randomly assigned unemployed people with mentors more suited for the
task. ...MORE
...[Note to Gawker, Salon, Huffington Post, and Jezebel: The best way to
take this idea out of context and turn it into fake news is to claim I
am advocating that rich people should buy and sell the unemployed just
like modern day slave traders.]
Also at Dilbert.com, Dilbert:
