Jobs: A Citizen Voices Issue Framework

In this view, Philadelphia has a shortage of quality jobs because its high taxes, stultifying regulation and hidebound unions have poisoned the climate for economic development. Proponents of this choice argue that unavoidable realities of the national and global economies pose enough challenges to this aging city without its government repeatedly making matters worse with ham-handed interventions.

To this choice’s proponents, the best thing – the only thing, in fact – that city government can do to foster job growth is to sharply reduce spending, taxes and regulation to free businesses to do what they do best, create wealth.

The city government, in this view, keeps wishing it could waive iron rules of economics because at the moment their workings don’t seem to favor Philadelphia. This choice would let wages and real estate costs in Philadelphia fall until they got low enough to attract to investors and entrepreneurs – and would make sure government didn’t get in the way of those business people doing what they must to take advantage of such market conditions.

The problem of Philadelphia, in this view, is that it doesn’t create enough wealth to satisfy the needs of its residents. Government can’t change that by schemes to redistribute the wealth or to make strategic bets on market forces. It would do better to get out of the way of markets and the people who understand them, and let the profit motive and free enterprise begin to generate jobs and income.

• Radically shrink the city government, beginning with all agencies that seek to intervene in the housing and job markets, or to influence economic development.

• Cut all taxes to the minimum level consistent with performing government’s basic functions, such as protecting public safety and property rights and maintaining roads.
  
• Let real estate and wages fall without government intervention until they become attractive to businesses looking for low-cost sites and labor.

• Eliminate environmental and other regulations that unduly inflate the costs of industrial and commercial properties in the city.

• Eliminate rules that require companies doing business with the city to pay union-level wages, or to meet affirmative action goals.

• Sharply reduce the number of permits and licenses businesses need to operate, and simplify the process of obtaining them.

• End all programs to give tax breaks to specific companies or market sectors.

• Neither block nor subsidize private ventures such as new sports stadia or riverboat gambling.

• Seek to encourage tourism not by taxpayer-subsidized promotion, but by cutting municipal taxes that gouge tourists – giving Philadelphia a competitive cost advantage over other East Coast cities.

• Taxes and regulations are a big part of the high cost of doing business in Philadelphia. Curbing them might allow some of the Philadelphia market’s advantages to lure more business investment.

• The city suffers doubly from its high taxes because businesses that want to benefit from regional assets without paying such taxes can simply move to the suburbs.

• Cutting taxes, particularly the wage tax, would do more good for working residents than any program that government could finance with the money it takes away from workers.

• Government does not create private-sector jobs; only businesses do. Only by freeing businesses inside the city to create wealth can Philadelphia escape the destructive cycle of the post-war years.

• Government by its nature does not have the ability to carry out economic plans; its efforts at worst are counterproductive, at best amount to inconsequential tinkering.

• Even if a city government in theory could intervene effectively in the economy, Philadelphia city government in practice operates on a type of old-fashioned patronage politics that is obnoxious to entrepreneurs and scares them away.

• If market forces have punished Philadelphia lately, why in the world should city government just surrender to them?

• Regions where government has worked wisely and flexibly with business leadership have experienced great successes at exploiting market forces to their benefit.

• The notion of free markets is a fantasy. Governments everywhere intervene on behalf of their business interests. It would be suicidal for Philadelphia to withdraw from that game.

• This choice ignores the right of workers to a fair livelihood, which includes the right to organize into unions.

• Reducing regulation would allow businesses to dump the environmental costs of their business unfairly on the neighborhoods where they operate.

• The city government can’t sharply cut its spending without ignoring the needs of its many poor residents, leaving them at the mercy of unfriendly market forces.

• Workers and businesses in many city neighborhoods have struggled not because of failure in a free market, but because of racist business practices and misguided government policies that denied them fair access to jobs and capital. Government action is needed to redress such injustices and level the playing field.