Who Will Drive the Economy?

Donald Trump says he would be “God’s greatest jobs president.” So far, the candidate has focused on renegotiating trade agreements, would have stopped Ford from building its new $2.5 billion factory in Mexico, and would have retaliated against China’s recent currency devaluation.

Regardless of whether this would work perfectly, Americans know Trump as a first-rate entrepreneur and businessman. They have legitimate expectations that Trump, at the least, would build an ecosystem that would foster and mentor their entrepreneurial aspirations; secondarily, he would have the best chance to drive the economy and jobs.

Many nonaffluent Americans know that a redistribution of wealth, such as Hillary Clinton’s proposal to increase capital gains taxes, is less likely to increase their standard of living than an increase in the economic pie for everyone. So, candidates must immerse themselves in ways to stimulate entrepreneurship and dramatically and quickly increase our gross domestic product and jobs.

I have been advocating the following silver bullet for the economy for several years. Company balance sheets have an estimated $10 trillion in liquid assets that could be put to work voluntarily, without government involvement or political partisanship, in the following win-win-win ways:

Help employees buy and rent homes.

Assist small companies seeking financing, especially suppliers and clients.

Finance public-private infrastructure investments, such as repairing highways, bridges, pipes, train systems, and schools.

Invest in solar and other alternatives to fossil fuels.

Today, home ownership is at the lowest level since 1994, with new housing starts off by 40 percent. Consequently, home building is down to 2 percent of G.D.P. from 6 percent. Banks remain very conservative on mortgage lending, and developers are afraid to build middle-income apartment houses because of a lack of renters who can show an adequate history of income and yet collectively have $1 trillion in student debt.

Companies know their employees better than banks do and have much to gain by helping employee living conditions. Likewise, no one can better project the future of their suppliers and customers, so providing them with financing is a good bet in many ways.

Putting to work some of the trillions of dollars sitting relatively idly in company bank and securities accounts — if not needed for acquisitions and stock buyback programs — would be a free-enterprise solution to our most important economic and social challenges.

Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, our recent prosperity presidents, governed during a dramatic increase in available capital after the U.S. Labor Department ruled in 1980 that pension funds had to diversify their portfolios away from just publicly traded securities into private company investments. The venture capital industry took off, funding whole new industries in computers, telecommunications, and biotech, and new low-tech ideas, such as big-box retailing (e.g., Staples) and competitors to the Postal Service (e.g., FedEx). Other alternative investment vehicles were basic economy drivers, such as real estate.

By the mid-1980s, Reagan could observe it was “the age of the entrepreneur.” Business schools created courses on entrepreneurship, and initial public offerings, which were virtually nonexistent in the 1970s, emerged and liquefied the venture capital portfolios.

Clinton’s term in office fed off this equity capital and hit the technology jackpot through cellphones and the Internet, with productivity increases that would never be fully measured.

In 2016, presidential hopefuls must focus on the federal funding of pure technology research that is too speculative for the private sector, as we appear to be on the verge of another hyper-tech era in areas such as biotechnology, robotics, metallurgy, nanotechnology, and new uses of the Internet. We cannot forget that the Internet was developed by America’s Department of Defense.

More urgent for our economy, however, and crucial for the millions of non-tech workers who are unemployed or underemployed, we need win-win-win help from corporations that can provide a new source of capital.

Americans who yearn for a Reagan-Clinton booming economy should concentrate on finding a president who sees the need to develop new strategies to tap underutilized financial resources for low-tech businesses especially, and who appreciates high tech, too.

Political commentators apparently have such cushy jobs and such a static sense of things that they cannot understand why jobs, the economy, and an attack on lobbyists are a primary concern of so many voters, or why the essence of Trump is not entertainer, where The Huffington Post still has him, but entrepreneur, or why Bernie Sanders is a savior, not a socialist, for many Democrats who lack economic security.

Politicians, like all Americans, have become jaded in thinking there could be a way to substantially increase our economic pie quickly, except for Trump’s focus on our international trade. They do not search for broad, innovative ideas based on what worked before.

There is a silver bullet for the U.S. economy — within our past, our borders, and our will!

Jeremy Wiesen, a longtime East Hampton resident, is a retired professor of entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business and is part of the U.S. State Department’s Global Entrepreneurship Program.