Reporter David Segal of The New York Times wrote a piece in the Sunday, September 19, issue entitled Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs – The New York Times which really resonated with me.

I am producing a feature film, and many have said to me, in one form or another, what one investor said in the article about starting a new company:  “You need to suspend disbelief to start a company, because so many people will tell you that what you’re doing can’t be done, and if it could be done, someone would have done it already.”  Segal describes entrepreneurs and people like me who are engaged in entrepreneur-like activity as having to be “just crazy enough.”

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In the Thursday, September 9, 2010, New York Times, Matt Bai, a political columnist, in an article entitled “In Obama Economic Stance, Risk of Confusion,” points out that President Obama made a significant, and probably mistaken, decision to turn the crafting of the 2009 stimulus legislation over to Congress.  As Bai points out, the legislation could have achieved one or both of two goals: first, to create targeted, short-term economic stimulus; or second, to fund longer-term investments in infrastructure, technology, and human capital that would have provided the foundation for sustainable growth and competitiveness.

As Bai points out, while the legislation had some investments that accomplished each of the two goals, neither potential goal was adequately pursued with the stimulus legislation. Instead, as Bai stated, Congress essentially used the legislation to address the most vocal “demands of disparate constituencies.”  There is a political consequence to this conclusion, which is that the majority of Americans now consider the stimulus legislation to have been a failure. Bai quotes Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff, “you should never let a serious crisis go to waste.” The crisis, which precipitated the passage of the legislation created an opportunity for fundamental societal change that was not taken.

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There is a relatively easy pair of solutions to the unemployment crisis.  The biggest issue for private sector employers which have provided retirement benefits for their employees is the burden of providing for future benefits for current and future retirees. (Government accounting is different. Government employers only have to provide for what they out in the current year.)  What many people do not understand is that when a private employer provides such benefits, it not only covers what it pays in the current year, but a share of what it will pay out in future years.  The exact allocation between current and future year benefit expenses varies from employer to employer, but there is no question that portion of current-year benefit expense allocable to future years is huge and it gets in the way of employers hiring new workers.

So how do we solve this problem?  It’s very simple, but the answer varies between pension and retiree medical expenses.

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