Bloomberg's Republican economic policy prescriptions

Workforce training

Trumpeting the city’s Workforce One Career Centers as a striking success, the mayor advocated additional funding for job training programs.

Mayor Bloomberg said that the project had seen a 50-fold increase in job placements over the last six years, from 500 placements to 25,000.

“By doing this,” the mayor said, “we’ve been better able to connect the supply of labor to the demand for labor. And we’ve also improved access to our training and placement services, by expanding the number of centers and their hours of operation.”

At the speech at the Navy Yard, the mayor announced the opening of ten new Workforce One Express Centers in the city over the next year, with the goal of increasing job placements by 40,000 over the next two years.

“The job training aspect is commendable,” said Petro. “Obviously, it’s something that the city should be doing.”

“It’s putting real people into real jobs,” added Cunningham. “It was also a key part of re-training people and putting them to work at the right jobs.”

Mayor Bloomberg said that the federal government “is wisely funding the replication of our approach in Tulsa, Oklahoma and parts of Ohio.”

“But it could help many more unemployed people by opening more centers like ours around the country,” he added.

“What struck me is, here’s a mayor that’s doing his job, and he’s throwing lessons out that he thinks could be helpful on the biggest issue facing America, which is putting people back to work,” said Cunningham. “Mayors and governors, if they have a good product, they like to shop it to the rest of the country.”

Instilling confidence, relying on business executives

The mayor highlighted what he described as the critical importance of building confidence — for businesses and among consumers.  In his speech, the mayor said, “Building confidence is a big part of getting the private sector to invest.” On Meet the Press, he said that economic stagnation stemmed from lack of confidence “more than anything else.” He attributed both the unwillingness of banks to make loans and the reluctance of companies with record amounts of cash on hand to invest that capital to a lack of confidence resulting from “ambiguity” in “government solutions.”

In significant ways, though, it appears that the mayor’s prescription for confidence reprises his themes on regulation and taxes.

“There is much pessimism in the system because there is much uncertainty about what Washington might or might not do — on taxes, regulations, and policies. And that uncertainty breeds economic paralysis,” he said.

Petro of the Drum Major Institute said that when the mayor spoke about instilling confidence, he was again referring to the need to reform regulation on business. Bloomberg remarked at the Navy Yard that the process of writing new regulations for the financial services and health insurance industries “has chilled economic activity.”

On Meet the Press, Bloomberg also suggested that President Obama needed more advice from business executives, citing Roger Altman — former Deputy Treasury Secretary to Bill Clinton and current chairman of Evercore Partners, which describes itself as “the most active investment banking boutique in the world” — as the “perfect” candidate to replace Larry Summers as the director of the President’s National Economic Council. He said that the President should be looking for “the perspective of somebody who’s actually had to get up in the morning and sweep the floors before his employees…came in, and locked the door afterwards, and worr[ied] about how to make…the payroll.”

New York City’s economy

Mayor Bloomberg held up New York City’s economic position as a model for other cities, and for the federal government, to follow when working to create jobs and economic growth.

Bloomberg told his audience at the Navy Yard that New York City has been “leading the nation in private sector job growth.”

“In fact,” he said, “our economy has grown twice as fast as the country’s — and eight times as fast as the rest of the state’s. Out economy has grown faster than any other major city’s in the country — and none of that growth has come on Wall Street.”

But according to some advocates, while New York’s growth looks good on paper, the city continues to suffer from the recession.

“When you take the bird’s eye view of the New York City economy, things look good relative to other cities in the country,” Petro said, “but if you look a little bit deeper and look at communities across the city, you’ll see a lot of pain, a lot of unemployment, and the jobs that do exist are completely insufficient for anybody to have any degree of financial stability.”

Daniel Morris, spokesperson for the Living Wage NYC Campaign, a coalition that advocates for legislation guaranteeing a living wage in New York City, pointed at a recent report by the New York Human Resources Administration, which calculates that 1.8 million New Yorkers were enrolled in the food stamp program as of October, a 124 percent increase since Bloomberg took office. Bloomberg has opposed legislation that would require companies that receive city contracts or subsidies to pay its workers a wage above the federal minimum, Morris said.