Yes we do, but nothing is certain to create more private sector jobs. Tax cuts, regulation cuts, and shrinking the overall footprint of government are good, but we shouldn't look at them as some sort of job-creating magic wand.
Oh, please. This whole smaller govt song and dance is tedious in the extreme, particularly with the current dearth of gainful employment provided by private industry, and with the tendency to provide shit fer wages.
That won't be changing any time RSN, given the economic forces of offshoring & automation.
We have the power, the right, and the opportunity to change the economic balance between concentrated wealth & the middle class, return to something like the post-WW2 shared prosperity, but that won't happen w/o strong redistribution of income. To merely wish it were different is to deny reality, to sound the death knell of the middle class as we know it.
American capitalists have broken the social compact of the New Deal, the deal where their part of the bargain was to provide American jobs. That's manifestly obvious to anybody not blinded by rightwing rhetoric & Libertopian delusion. They don't need us all to work, but merely to consume, and to do so on credit they provide. There is a limit to that model, however, and we've reached it. Witness the massive deleveraging in the private sector.
Few people have any grasp of just how much income has shifted to the top, and just how badly that starves working people of their previous share of national income. Much of what capitalists formerly paid in wages they now put into their portfolios & into offshore enterprise. The only practical way they can be made to share is through taxation. If the tippy top earners paid 50% in federal taxes, their share of after tax national income would still be larger than it was 30 years ago.
We have an opportunity & an obligation to the future to raise taxes at the top, to use those funds to create employment & to upgrade the commons, the public facilities we all use, to improve our competitiveness with better health & education, to create & enforce a financial system of honest growth rather than destructive swings of speculation.
That will require some sort of national epiphany, some casting aside the illusions of denial so prevalent today. Our capitalist leadership nearly provided that in 2008, and they're still working on it in that blind & disconnected way that only oligarchs can achieve.
Can't figure it out? You won't, not until you question your most basic assumptions & beliefs. The bailout just allowed a lot of wiggle room in maintenance of illusion, as did acquisition of more govt debt. That debt acquisition has been cover for destructive policy hugely favoring the Wealthy for 30 years. Bread lines? They're real- you just can't see them, because they're now electronic, invisible. Home ownership? what a giggle. Anybody who bought during the bubble is just paying a different kind of rent, higher than the market rate. They won't see daylight for another decade, if then.