PLANET MONEY did a good show last month on what politicians mean when they talk about "creating jobs". They focused on Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, who in a move fairly typical of politicians in recent decades promised to "create" 250,000 jobs in Wisconsin in his first term, and by that appeared to mean that he would take personal credit every single time a Burger King decided to establish a new assistant manager position. Obviously it's pretty hard to legitimately disentangle what different factors lead to job creation during the tenure of any head of government, but if we're going to use the rough-and-ready approach of crediting presidents with being good on this metric if there was unusually high job growth during their tenure in office, then one William Jefferson Clinton has unimpeachable street cred. The United States' economy created 23m jobs during the Clinton presidency . Total payroll employment grew 21.1%, far outstripping population growth of 8.9%. (For comparison, under Ronald Reagan, payroll employment grew 17.7%, with 7% population growth; under George W. Bush it grew a miserable 2.3%, well behind population growth of 7.7%.)

Now Mr Clinton has 14 ideas in Newsweek on how to create some jobs. Here's one I think is really worth considering.

2. CASH FOR STARTUPS If you start a business tomorrow, I can give you all the tax credits in the world, but since you haven't made a nickel yet, they're of no use to you. President Obama came in with a really good energy policy, including an idea to provide both a tax credit for new green jobs and for startup companies, to allow the conversion of the tax credit into its cash equivalent for every employee hired. Then last December, in the tax-cut compromise, the Republicans in Congress wouldn't agree to extend this benefit because they said, “This is a spending program, not a tax cut. We're only for tax cuts.” It was a mistake. The cash incentive worked. On the day President Obama took office, the U.S. had less than 2 percent of the world market in manufacturing the high-powered batteries for hybrid or all-electric cars. On the day of the congressional elections in 2010, thanks in large part to the cash-incentive policy, we had 20 percent of global capacity, with 30 new battery plants built or under construction, 16 of them in Michigan, which had America's second-highest unemployment rate. We have to convince the Republican Congress that this is a good thing. If this incentive structure can be maintained, it's estimated that by 2015 we'll have 40 percent of the world's capacity for these batteries. We could get lots of manufacturing jobs in the same way. I could write about this until the cows come home.

I could've picked another one of Mr Clinton's ideas, one less likely to raise any hackles, like his call for shortening review periods for government infrastructure projects. I agree with that too. But I'm picking this one because it's difficult. This one is about having a national industrial policy. A lot of readers here are going to reject that idea out of hand. I don't. Judging by the fact that this Rana Foroohar article in Time is on the website's top-ten most-read list, there are a lot of other folks out there who are at least receptive to the idea as well. (Read that article too, by the way. It's really interesting.) And the concentration on Michigan and the car industry here reminds us of the largest recent instance of American industrial policy: the decision to bail out the car industry. That intervention probably saved a couple of million jobs, and left Ford and GM as solid companies. The experience of Germany in the financial crisis and post-crisis recovery (6% unemployment, at the moment) suggests that having an industrial policy and paying companies to keep jobs may be a strategy that has its advantages.

Oh, also, Mr Clinton is big on energy-optimising retrofits for existing buildings. Seems like a good idea too. Check out the other ideas, see what you think.

(Photo credit: AFP)