 Hello, I'm Michael Lind. I'm Policy Director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation. I'm here today to talk with Leo Hendry, Managing Director of Intermedia Partners, Chair of the Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation, and Co-Chair of the Task Force on Job Creation, which has just published A Vision for Economic Renewal and American Jobs Agenda, which is being unveiled today at the New America Foundation. Thank you for coming, Leo. No, thank you, Michael. Well, Leo, all the talk in Washington is about cuts, about solving the deficit problem, not only the short term, but also long term social security and Medicare problems. While we continue to have mass unemployment, notwithstanding the technical definition of a recovery, what's wrong with that? Well, what's wrong with it is we are deeply still in this recession, Michael. Real unemployment is north of 18%. We have roughly 29 and 1 half million women and men who would seek employment tomorrow if they could find it. And in this sturm and drying around cutting and cutting and cutting and the deficit, we've completely lost sight of the fact, what is it going to do, if anything, for job creation? Because we need to find literally millions of jobs, millions. We're so far deep in the hole that if we don't put the jobs agenda right up front alongside all of these other concerns, and nobody is suggesting that cutting the deficit over time isn't an appropriate concern. But when you sit in a prolonged jobless recovery as we are, you have to never lose sight of the fact that our fundamental responsibility as a government and a society is to get as close to full employment as we can. And for 200 days, it's a staggering number. But for 200 days, the Republicans in the House and their counterparts in the Senate have not had a single conversation on the record about job creation. Well, the task force has come up with a number of provocative and thoughtful suggestions for job creation. Can you tell us about some of them? Well, we acknowledge right up front that the manufacturing sector has been diminished past the point of almost no recovery. We have eight or 9% of workers in that sector. We need at least three times as many. A society and an economy as diverse and large as ours must have around 20% to 25% of its workers making things. And as I said, we've slipped down into the 8%, 9% range. What's causing a lot of that is just misguided trade policies. So we spend a lot of time on trade in general and certainly trade with our biggest competitor, which is China, which has cost us millions of those jobs. We also are very sensitive to the fact that the business community has to have the proper incentives to join us in this initiative. So we talk about tax credits. We talk about changing overseas taxation policies that would induce manufacturers and other companies to keep jobs here, to bring jobs here. We're very sensitive to the older worker who's unemployed and to the younger worker who can't seem to find his or her first job. So you don't see this as a conflict between business and labor that they're partners rather in job creation than in growth in the US? You know, a lot of people say what is it going to take to motivate business to create jobs? It's going to take certainty. I come from the business side of the economy and companies are anxious to be profitable, to be successful, but they're nervous right now. They're nervous in the extreme. They haven't been this nervous since the Depression. So what you have to have are policies in place, Michael, that induce them to be a partner in this initiative. I'm not suggesting by any matter that the business community has been hanging back on this. The policies aren't there in place to incent them to move forward. Well, another policy that the task force endorses is a much greater investment in infrastructure. You know, every woman or man that might be listening today will tell you that in their town, their community, there's public infrastructure that is falling down. The aggregate number is a staggering $3 trillion. If we approach that responsibly, if we fixed that in a sensitive way through what's called a national infrastructure bank, if we had what's called bi-domestic or bi-American provisions associated with it, it would be the most instant job creator we could imagine. Next to that comes youth unemployment. We have roughly 5 million women and men, young women and men who can't find that first job either out of college or high school. So there are some fixes that we prescribe that could be quite instantaneous and quite momentous, but we're not unmindful of the fact that that's not the long-term solution. The long-term solution is a set of policies that put this economy and the American worker back first. Well, polls show that the American people are much more concerned about jobs than they are about the deficit, and there's support for the goal, if not necessarily all of the methods of infrastructure spending and manufacturing revival. What do you think is the obstacle, the disconnect between the policy makers and the public on these points? Unfortunately, too much of our Congress is influenced by the multinational corporations that are not just concerned about seeing jobs shipped overseas, about profits being earned disproportionately overseas. And until that is fixed, sort of this finance of campaigns issue, you're gonna have these areas, but the American people look to their left at the house of their neighbor and look to the right of the house of their neighbor, they look within their own house and they either see massive unemployment or grave concern about perhaps becoming unemployed. Cutting the deficit, this is a part of the debate, Michael, that has been lost in the last several weeks. If you only cut, if you only cut, you're actually gonna increase dramatically unemployment. You have to have thoughtful revenue raises associated with the cuts. None of us believe that this government can't cut something. What it should never cut is social security and Medicare to fix this problem. These are the safety nets that we promised the American people from the 1930s on in the case of social security in the mid-60s in the case of Medicare. Well, there's no biblical proverb. Without a vision, the people perish. And so you and the task force have set forth your vision. It's a vision for economic renewal, an American jobs agenda. Thank you, Leo Henry. Thanks, Michael.