by David Safier

Andrei Cherny, State Chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, is also an accomplished writer and analyst. He is president of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

Cherny has an article in the recent edition of Financial Times, A jobs plan for the “new work order. I didn't register on the site, so I can't read the piece on line, but Cherny emailed a complete version.

His basic concept: entrepreneurship in the form of business start-ups is a major part of the country's economic engine, and we need to encourage people to venture out and start new businesses. That means health care and retirement benefits have to be portable, so people can risk leaving a job and venture out on their own without putting their personal and financial health in peril, and government programs, like Obama's Startup America, should be given the same kind of priority we've given to get big businesses back on their feet.

So it is on entrepreneurs, often an afterthought in the conventional jobs discussion, that the nation should focus. Revitalizing entrepreneurship should start with a tax holiday for new businesses that is directly tied to the number of jobs they create. Healthcare and retirement benefits should be more universal, personalized, affordable and portable so that entrepreneurs have a greater ability to walk away from big companies and strike out on their own. More states should follow the lead of places such as New Jersey and Oregon, which have started to modernize unemployment benefits so that they not only cushion the blow for laid-off workers but also encourage and enable them to find better jobs and create new ones for themselves and others. The Obama administration’s Startup America public-private partnership should be expanded so that businesses can be started with the kind of urgency and resources the federal government used to bail out failed corporations.

You can read the whole piece after the jump.

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