Open Letter

This is an open letter to our President:

Mr. President-

Like the 43 people who have held your office before you, you are, I'm certain, busy from day-to-day. I certainly wouldn't want your schedule, nor would I care to have your job. There are a great many difficulties you or any American President faces in that job.
First, there is the pragmatic challenge of how to address any number of issues facing our country. In a vacuum, fixing things like education, health care, security concerns and employment is a difficult enough task. I mean, you can think of an idea that might work but implementing the plan is the only way to find out for sure. It's my understanding you've met with some resistance in Washington when it comes to plan implementation.
And that's point number two. In a controlled, lab environment, being the President is a hard job. Add politics to the mix as a constant variable and the whole science experiment of being the President goes from an introductory to upper division course.
Finally, there is the whole notion that, clearing both of these hurdles, there still isn't clear sailing. Even if you craft an effective plan to solve a problem and get bi-partisan support (along with Vatican validation of the miracle you just pulled off) there's still the problem of effectiveness. The great plan, whatever it is, probably won't work well for everyone. A jobs plan that helps factory workers, for instance, might not help much for tech workers.
Such is the trouble with your job, which is why I wouldn't want to have your job. Sitting here, like so many other Americans, I would, however like to have some job.
I know you and your Washington counterparts talk about jobs a lot. And with good reason. Ours is a consumer-driven economy. When people buy TVs and cars, go on vacation, get apples from the store, pump a little gas and buy a box of Girl Scout cookies...OK, two boxes...alright, alright, 20 boxes...damn you Thin Mints!! At any rate, when we buy stuff, someone somewhere needs to make new stuff to replace what we bought. Someone has to stock it, ship it, store it and sell it.
While there is a lament related to consumerism, the truth is when we buy stuff, everyone benefits. Henry Ford knew this as well as anyone.
And that's the problem with unemployment. When people don't work, they have no means to buy. Not only that, they use set-aside tax revenue for social support programs while simultaneously being unable to replenish those programs with income and sales tax generation. In short, it's a burden for government programs and businesses to have large groups of people unemployed.
I know you understand that and I'm certain you'd change the situation had you a magic wand. My personal struggles have been, in comparison to many others, minor. One man I've heard about was recently hired for a job, ending a four-year stint of being jobless. And he's not alone. There are thousands of unemployed people who have been so for a year or more.
I know employment issues are complex and full of political static for people like you. You and other Presidents before you have formulated plans to retrain workers, develop public works projects to put masses of people to work and encourage business development and expansion within our borders.
These various plans are usually effective to some degree or another--at least enough to pour a bit more revenue and consumer spending into the economy to the extent that businesses sell more goods, need to expand and thus hire more workers.
But I seem to have uncovered an area of need that Presidents often overlook. Don't feel badly. I was unaware of this circumstance myself until I was in the middle of it. There are plenty of open and available jobs. Believe me. I search every day. There are jobs by the tens of thousands listed all over the country all the time.
Certainly some people are being hired but not nearly as many as could be. And that's the nature of the problem. Some of the jobs being listed are being listed in perpetuity. One job, for instance, at a nearby college was listed in August of last year. Here, in February of the following year, the job has yet to be filled. There are dozens of additional jobs like that which are posted repeatedly, week after week, month after month and they never get filled. Perhaps there isn't a big enough pool of applicants. But shouldn't these companies hire someone if they had just one qualified applicant?  What baseball team, for example, would continue looking for a catcher if the only one who applied was Buster Posey? Voters still elected office seekers running unopposed. Why isn't one qualified person enough? If these teams had 50 crummy catchers lined up and one Buster Posey, would they choose someone else? What difference does it then make if those others are there or not? Some people I know in my same position, of being an experienced, highly trained, highly educated professional, find themselves all too frequently in place of Buster Posey, being passed over, one could only imagine, because the company is looking for more choices.
So along with plans to fix our awful infrastructure and retrain and re-educate displaced workers, perhaps you could add this issue to an already full plate of problems to deal with related to employment. If more companies would simply choose any of the qualified people applying for work rather than hold out for whatever reasons, leaving these positions in employment limbo, the need for you or anyone else in Washington to address jobs would diminish greatly, I'm certain.
I appreciate the time, Mr. President. I'll let you get back to work. I understand a pretty serious snow storm has swept across your neighborhood and the White House walkway isn't going to shovel itself. Being from Hawaii, I doubt you have much experience with shoveling snow, though. Maybe that's a solution: hire people like me to shovel out the South and Mid-Atlantic states. If I bring some of that snow back to California with me, you'll be able to help with three areas of need all at once--get people back east back on the road and back to school, get loads of people back to work and solve the California drought.
Hey, this problem-solving thing is pretty easy. Maybe I'll try to get your job after all.