The Republicans in Virginia’s House of Delegates have passed a lot of bills to promote “jobs and opportunity” this year — at least 34 by my count, based on a compendium of bills approved by the House on the House Speaker’s website. The best that can be said is that, if enacted into law, most of them wouldn’t do too much damage. A number use the old ploy of exempting favored groups from assorted taxes, which is a bad thing because the state tax code has too many exemptions already, but for the most part they are inoffensive.
But it is difficult to imagine these narrow-bore bills having much impact on Virginia employment. In the long run, the best way to increase employment and economic opportunity are by making sure the commonwealth does a good job of performing core functions and services, keeping taxes low and getting the hell out of the way. If legislators really want to promote jobs and opportunities, here are some general strategies they should pursue that require no expansion in the scope of government.
Build knowledge clusters. Companies are more competitive, more likely to grow faster and more likely to spin off new enterprises when they belong to a strong knowledge cluster, usually focused on a specific industry. Most of the knowledge resides in the companies themselves, but some of it resides in academic institutions, research centers, not-for-profit organizations and the legal and financial professions. Knowledge concentrations lead to greater innovation and higher levels of productivity, and they attract outside capital investment. Government is not particularly adept at creating knowledge clusters, but it when such clusters already exist, government can act as a catalyst to get key players organized and acting in the common interest, and it can play an important role by supporting community college and higher ed programs to create a stream of graduates possessing skills relevant to the clusters.
In my day job, I have worked with the state of North Carolina, which has played a role in creating the North Carolina Aerospace Alliance, and with metro Atlanta, which, with the state of Georgia, is actively promoting a digital entertainment industry. Virginia has numerous knowledge clusters, too, but I don’t see the state doing anything substantive to promote any of them.
Reform human settlement patterns. You don’t have to buy into the “smart growth” vision to acknowledge the need to reform Virginia’s scattered, disconnected, low-density human settlement patterns. Just think resource scarcity. Our human settlement patterns have evolved during an age charactrerized by energy abundance and a profligate use of natural resources. While the Global Financial Crisis has temporarily obscured the fact by depressing energy and commodity prices, we are moving to a new plateau of higher energy and resource prices. (Don’t believe me? The 2.4 billion inhabitants of China and India do.) We need to evolve more compact, better connected communities that consume less energy and fewer raw materials. We don’t need to employ social engineering to reform human settlement patterns. We simply need to (a) devise funding mechanisms for transportation and public services that require households and enterprises to pay their location-variable costs, and (b) scrap the antiquated zoning codes that lock existing development patterns into place.
Want to promote job creation? More efficient human settlement patterns will provide cost savings for households, enterprises and municipal government.
Overhaul the health care system. Virginia Republicans rightfully regarded Obamacare as a monstrosity that would have increased the role of government and transferred wealth without addressing the underlying causes of escalating healthcare costs. Unfortunately, the Republican proposals, though relatively harmless, would have little effect. If they could just grit their teeth and admit it, Obamacare did contain a few good ideas, most particularly: measuring medical outcomes, disseminating best practices, and increasing transparency. There is nothing inherently “socialistic” or “big-governmentish” about these ideas.
There is no reason that Virginia needs to wait for the federal government to reform the state health care system. A good place to start would be to convene all major stakeholders — hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, consumers — and expand upon the state’s existing but tepid data collection measures. Key goals would be to measure medical outcomes, allow health plans and providers to access the data to improve quality and reduce costs, and share the data with consumers so they could select providers on the basis of value (i.e. the best trade-off of price and quality). As measured by the Dartmouth Atlas, Virginia’s health care sector already delivers the best value anywhere on the East Coast. But there is huge room for improvement. We should aspire to be lead the country.
Want to create jobs? How about having a healthcare system that provides top quality care at half the cost of anywhere else in the country?