How I would create a couple of million jobs--for $53B

My most important takeaway from this is that you're starting to publicize the conversation from the entrepreneurial elite.

When the first recession dip happened in the millennium and we were lamenting the manufacturing industry, I was preaching the same thing to my wife and liberal friends, that it's about retraining and that's where our tax dollars should go rather than subsidies and tariffs. Unfortunately, especially with government spending, the devil is in the details and the follow up accounting.  Look at all of the money that was pissed away to corrupt contractors in Iraq with nothing to show for it.

From a purely technology industry perspective, the implementation details that need to be solved are with Placement.  Every job posting for startups has "Rockstar Developer" in them.  The people you're training won't be able to get a sniff from entrepreneurs who need to maximize each dollar spent on a new employee and they are not willing to train people up while building their team. I'd say they could freelance, but that market is drying up as the cost of living in the US has out priced many developers here against Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe.  This won't change until people start to realize the true cost of a Repeat-Quality-Check loop that happens with cheap dev.

Finally, you have to solve the no-skin = no-value human penchant for not caring too much about things we get for free.

I think if you combine the arguments above, you can get to a solution where Government takes tax dollars to Subsidize Placement of Individuals who Qualify by paying their own way for Retraining with a Government Qualified Student Loan.  Place them within Larger Companies (banks, established Tech Giants like MS) who can absorb their nascent skill set while getting a Subsidy for (like you said) the first X months while the person is employed.  To make it work, repurpose some bureaucrats from different areas of the government in order to qualify and follow up (this is an absolute MUST).  MS can complain about not getting enough H1-B's to come in from India, and be presented with this counterargument of "why don't you hire the people from our program?"

Why not spend 1/10th of the money and instead of paying people to train create online training classes. Thus basically we could train people over and over again for the cost of bandwidth. Didn't we hit the age of the internet?

I am sure we could video the class once, and for the same price or less buy them each a netbook/chromebook cheap get them internet access - and trained up, and could have advanced classes, so that people could get better.

The only issue I see is that although we would have people trained up, that does not create jobs. But its a good first step..

Great article Jason. Interesting thoughts to ponder. Here is my perspective as a web developer.

What you are creating for $53B is not a couple of a million jobs but a couple of million "start-up ready" employees. Frankly these employees are not that valuable and would be out performed by the couple of million already start-up ready and much cheaper to hire college graduates that are going to have an increasingly hard time finding a good job out of college. Also, are there really that many entry level start up jobs that need to be filled? I think that people who currently have the skill set you are describing are already having a hard time finding a job. The "talent drought" is only for highly trained, highly talented, technical people that have years of practice, experience and professional training as well as the in built drive that lead them to get those skills in the first place. Even a fresh out of school completely green CS grad has usually dedicated thousands and thousands of hours mastering their technical skills before and during their academic career.

Anyways, I do think you bring up some really great points and I do think some kind of reform is needed. Using tax dollars for valuable high quality vocational education is a great idea. Figuring out how to structure that vocational education to be efficient and effective is another whole problem to figure out.

This is a really inspiring article. Jason, I don't know if you're able to comment on this or not, but do you have any kind of vocational education projects brewing?

> Oh wait, venture capitalists think social media is a better investment than education.

I fully agree that education is a much more socially valuable investment than social media. But it seems the reason VCs go for social media kinds of things is because those are more likely to be profitable.

Any thoughts on how to change that?

very naive assumptions about what it costs and what it takes to train the unemployed (which isn't the problem to begin with, but that is a separate issue)

put simply, if it only took 3 months and $4k to train people to be ready for startup tech jobs, then everybody would already be doing it