What does it mean when a politician “creates jobs”?
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It means, generally, that they “created” an environment that was friendly towards businesses.
A common technique is to give a business a reduction in their local taxes (property or income), if they employ “x” people.
But keep in mind, they really didn’t “create” jobs.
They gave away tax money.
There’s two basic ways.
A politician can pass legislation where the government spends money directly on new projects. Often they are infrastructure, (like building highways or other public-works projects) or starting government – run businesses, or giving government money to private businesses so they can expand their businesses.
Each new project or business will require people to do the work, so they will offer new jobs to people.
The other way is for politicians to change the rules in which existing businesses work. They may cut taxes for businesses or change the rules which will encourage existing businesses to expand and grow and/or attract new companies to be started.
Again, this means extra work needs to be done, and extra people will be hired.
Truthfully it can mean whatever they want.
Examples of when claims are made:
When a politician approves spending for certain projects that employ people. Like building and sports stadium that now has x amount of concession workers.
It can also be claimed for projects that spur contracts for work to be done. So they may also make this claim for something like approving spending to build a bridge, which will create contracts for engineers, contractors, etc.
They can create a new task force or department (like Bush creating Homeland Security.)
But there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
New stadium cost millions of local taxpayer resources that otherwise could’ve funded more police officers.
Contracts are only temporary and when bridge is done they’ll need to find new work elsewhere.
New departments or tasks require either additional or reallocated spending – so tax or ratepayers are being hit for more money, or jobs are being moved out of another role into a new role, or the office is just being renamed and nothing was “created” other than a new sign and logo to change out the letterhead and business cards.
And of course some just flat out lie or take credit for a company hiring folks claiming the company did so as a result of their policy as a politician so they created jobs.
We’re getting off track with discussing import tariffs.
Manufacturing jobs that do not require specialized skills are never coming back.
The simple fact is it is too expensive to make commodity goods in America, not only because of an expensive minimum wage compared to elsewhere in the world, but also due to additional costs that people tend to ignore, such as taxes, facilities, and benefits.
Also, people are generally ignorant that the total dollar value of manufactured goods in America is nearly equal to to total output of manufactured goods in the 1950s.
This is unknown to most people due to the heavy emphasis on automation. It simply doesn’t take a large workforce to create the same amount of goods.
The fact remains that unless the politician is hiring people for his staff, he cannot create jobs.
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