We heard an excellent point made by Ed Schultz, the radio talk show host and an MSNBC TV show host yesterday. Ed’s comment was in regards to President Obama’s efforts with a Job Summit to accelerate the growth of employment in our country.

Many CEOs of large corporations participated in the Jobs Summit with President Obama. Ed raised a point that may be overlooked. Big Business in the United States is responsible to stock holders/investors and their desire to see quarter-to-quarter increases in sales and profitability – short term performance increases. These increases are what runs up the price of a stock and makes investors in the company money.

As we recently have seen, the employment cuts made by businesses has dramatically increased productivity – the result of fewer people producing more. Just about every quarterly financial report from Big Business exhibits better profitability on the bottom line (due to cost reductions) while few have exhibited top line (sales and revenue) growth.

As the economy improves, Big Business slowly improves (slowly because they are so big) and sales increase. While business improves with the productivity gains, companies have higher profits translating to higher stock prices – all good. However, what is the incentive for a big company and their executives (many of whom own large blocks of their company’s stock) to add jobs until the business dramatically improves? Adding jobs before business is booming will cost more, reduce profits for that quarter and put downward pressure the stock price. The addition of jobs in the “Short Term” (one of President Obama’s stated goals at the Job Summit) is a contradiction to what Big Business has to do to satisfy stockholders.

So where can President Obama and his administration get the most bang for the strained financial resources our government has for creating jobs in the “Short Term”? We want their efforts targeted at Small Business.

As the economy improves, the owners of Small Business will add jobs NOW to meet the increased demand for their products and services. They are not the big behemoth that needs business to be booming to start adding jobs. These are the folks that can add 3, 5 or 10 jobs quickly. They don’t need to concern themselves about what happens to their stock prices or how an analyst will view their performance this quarter versus last quarter – they just want their business to grow and get healthy.

An example of this is the “Green” Jobs we all wanted created in OUR country. Companies like General Electric and Siemens have been given enormous financial incentives from OUR government to fast track the renewable energy effort – we applaud the companies & OUR government for their efforts (see our Latest News, October 3o post: The Economy & Energy). Ed Schultz told us about a Small Business in Indiana (not China) that manufactures gears for wind turbines. They want to add jobs to meet increased demand. They can not get their financial package request through OUR government’s process like a GE or Siemens has been able to do.

President Obama – target the jobs efforts on streamlining the processes and incentives to quickly get resources to Small Business. The banks we bailed out are not doing it for Small Business, so it’s up to US to fast track Small Business so they can change the job picture in the “Short Term” and beyond!