The short answer is with money. The long answer is that jobs are created with money but not the kind of money you have been led to believe. If you rap any economist for hire on the kneecap, his first response will be to say that jobs are created by investment. Well they are, indirectly. Jobs are created by investment when an opportunity exists. Opportunity is created by one or both of two things, innovation and demand.

In order to better understand contemporary economics, you should become familiar with the subtleties of the new language of economics. The meanings of certain terms have been usurped by contemporary economists (the con-econs). The con-econs have redefined the terms competition, growth, employment and investment to serve the goals of the shrinking class of the well to do.

Investment used to mean capital expenditure with the objective of increasing or creating the capacity for producing something, goods or services. Now it implies that passive and active investment have the same meaning. For instance bonds are an active investment and stocks are not, yet both are treated identically in in the calculation of GDP. Bonds have a reasonable chance of creating jobs periodically and are nearly always used for some tangible project, whereas investment in stocks has the potential to create jobs once, at the initial issue. The buying and selling of stocks after the initial issues provides employment for stock brokers and most of the investment remains, languishing, in the market for extended periods.

Employment used to mean a job that had a reasonable chance for producing enough income to support a family. Now a job means whatever paycheck a person can get his hands on is a job, regardless of the purchasing power of that paycheck. A person in the UAW has a paycheck sufficient to support a family. A person working as a McDonalds server does not. It is reasonable to say that a person working for McDonalds has half a job because it will pay for half or less of the support of a typical family. As more and more people in our economy are working at McJobs, it is reasonable to assume that a headcount of people working in this country is has a different meaning than it did 20 years ago.

Growth used to mean revenue growth. When a company produced and sold more product than it had sold in the previous quarter, that was called growth. To con-econs, profitability has become equated to growth. The term profit growth has largely supplanted revenue growth in security analysis. Profit growth is usually a result of cost cutting, downsizing or off shoring. Well both can result in higher profit, but profit growth through cost cutting is a dead end. Companies that are doing this are not really growing although analysts recommend them to investors as if they were.

Of all the con-econ re-characterizations of a word, what they have done to the word competition is the most sinister. Competition used to mean that there was someone else in the same business as you who was trying to win over your customers on an even playing field. The new meaning of the word competition is a geopolitical. It is no longer your business that is in competition, it is your country. As if the sole purpose of a country is business. The reasoning, and I use the term loosely, is if your country does not drop trade barriers to allow in more competition for your business, your business will become less competitive. Huh?

Terminology engineering of this scope deserves reverse terminology engineering. We should make a distinction between the old term investment and the new "meaning" by creating a new term for money languishing in the stock market. Money in, or transacted into or through the stock market should be called Buffetment, in honor of Warren Buffet the market maven. The term McJob already conveys the disdain of the American people for the new service economy, but we need to start accounting for McJobs in order to better appreciate the direction of our economy. We should introduce a new term in reporting from the BLS titled McPloyment in which each McJob is counted for what it is, half a job. The new meaning of growth should be countered by using the term Degrowth, because that is what it is. The con-econ meaning of competitiveness can be made more clear by using the term submititiveness, and competition; submitition, to more clearly indicate that we are bending to the will of multinational corporations not satisfied in the supply of domestic companies that are ripe for corporate raiding.

Each of these new terms will help us to understand the forces that have impacted the quantity and quality of jobs in America. They will also help us to understand that economists are employed by the wealthy and that they are not working for you, they are working against you. And that their activities are not, in truth, aimed at creating opportunity of any sort for Americans.

Demand is the cornerstone of opportunity. Demand is the combination of need and means. Need without means is not demand and vice versa. It should be obvious to anyone that is not enlisted in the con-econ movement, that McPloyment reduces the potential market for goods and services. The higher the McPloyment relative to employment, the lower the aggregate demand is for goods and services.

Buffetment is a result of more and more money concentrated in the hands of people who already have some. It is spare money that then proceeds to do little for the day to day economy until your idiot nephew inherits your estate and blows it on jet ski racing. That money could do more for the economy, create real competitiveness and create real jobs if it were invested in capital expansion of business. But then, there would have to be a reason for it to be invested, and since the economy is not actually growing, what is the point. So the money is effectively not producing demand anymore and in fact doesn't even create McPloyment.

Degrowth is the what has been driving corporate profits, increasingly, for the past twenty years. The external corporate raiders of old have been replaced by a new breed of internal corporate raider. The old raiders, T. Boone Pickens for instance, would LBO a company and carve off the good pieces to put cash in their pocket. The smart boys at Yale and Harvard figured out that you don’t even have to do an LBO to get control, just get a job as a V.P. and you can have the same kind of party. Degrowth is manifest in cost cutting, rightsizing and downsizing and here lately, off shoring of jobs. These things have been going on long enough that I notice my spell checker has the terms in its dictionary. Degrowth then produces no jobs and the result is McPloyment.

Submitition will kill any company that does not immediately off shore work as quickly as possible. Foreign investment in the U.S., promoted by lowering trade barriers is a subchapter of submitition. It opens the door for trans national internal and external corporate raiding. This also increases McPloyment.

In fact, this would be a good point to introduce a new counter con-econ term, McConomy. An illustrative definition is probably not required.

Innovation is the lever of real economic growth. Without it, demand remains unrequited. It both fulfills demand through enhancing production and can create it through new products. Innovation is a luxury. It is the least productive of all undertakings because the vast majority of effort at innovating is fruitless. Only about one in ten companies with good enough business plans to get venture capital succeed. This doesn’t even begin to account for the myriad ideas and ventures that do not even make the cut with venture investors. We still spend a great deal of time and wealth in the pursuit of innovation, and our history is one that tells us that it does pay off and will lift all boats.

The problem is that innovation is dependent on real investment, and is rewarded by Buffetment. But the initial investment is predicated on demand. Without a perceived demand, there is no opportunity for innovation to exploit. Therefore as aggregate demand is diminished, so is innovation. In our, thankfully technology happy world, innovation is both faster and easier than ever before, and will be able to help sustain our McConomy for a number of years to come. But dying demand will eventually turn off the tap of funding for technology, because it is still expensive to develop and if the McPloyed will work cheaply enough, there is no point.

So how do your create jobs in an McConomy that appears to be actively adverse to the creation of anything more substantial than a McJob? The answer is political. After all, the advocates of the McConomy are political and the course of creating the McConomy was set through politics. We must understand the issues, which means deciphering the maze of con-econ disinformation. Things that benefit corporations, and by that what is meant is corporate officers, do not necessarily or even usually benefit the people. As this is a country that ostensibly exists at the pleasure of the people, we need to exercise our right and will to control our own destiny. We need to make the powers that be understand that we can see through the guise of con-econ disinformation and will find and elect representatives that will see to the interests of the people.

This may sound, and indeed the con-econs have characterized their opposition as, collectivist, but you should know that the philosophical distinction between socialism and capitalism exists mainly to prevent the wholesale nationalization of industry. Nationalization is not going to happen in this country. We are a people who respect the rights and creativity and property of people. Either side of the issue of labor and management will not go overboard if subject to the common sense interpretation of rightness and fitness of things that is the hallmark greatness of the American people. You just need to act on what you, the Democrat mainstream and an increasing number of Republicans know, that our McConomy is not good enough, that we have worked hard to make America a great place and will work hard keep it that way.