Skip to footer

What can be done to create jobs? Six leading ideas.

The job market has shown some very welcome signs of improvement lately, but it still has a long way to go before approaching something Americans would call normal. Here’s a look at some of the proposed solutions out there. 

2. Fix up the housing market

Reuters/Carlos Barria/Files
An auction sign for a property is seen in Miami Gardens, Fla., in this 2009 photo. There are more than 6,600 home foreclosure filings per day, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonpartisan watchdog group based in Durham, N.C.

  • By Mark Trumbull Staff writer

It's no secret that the housing market still has problems. In fact, few challenges to the US economy outweigh the housing bust. Despite low interest rates, millions of homeowners are unable to refinance, and the high level of foreclosures casts a cloud of uncertainty over the housing market.

Now that numerous initiatives under Mr. Obama and former President George W. Bush have yielded only modest fruit, many economists say new approaches should be tried. A host of ideas has emerged – aimed at preventing foreclosures, lightening homeowner debt loads, or spurring greater demand for real estate.

Glenn Hubbard, a top economist for Mr. Bush, and his Columbia University colleague Christopher Mayer have put forth one approach designed to ramp up the pace of mortgage refinancing.

The plan would offer current low interest rates to millions of Americans with loans backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. A typical household might see a 15 percent cut in its monthly mortgage payment – savings that could provide a buffer against default and foreclosure, or at least free up money that the family could spend elsewhere in the economy.

2 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.