Jim Gentile of the Tucson-based Research Corporation offers a prescription for job growth in the HuffPo:

The key to jobs in America has been, and remains, science and technology. In the second half of the 20th century, scientific and technological advances are estimated to have been responsible for well over 40 percent of U.S. prosperity. "It was innovation based on science," wrote Yale University President Richard Levin in Foreign Affairs, "that propelled the United States past Japan during the two decades prior to the crash of 2008. It was Japan's failure to innovate that caused it to lag behind."

Yet America's historic advantage in innovation is being allowed to dissipate. "Not long ago, America's global leadership in technology innovation was taken as a given," writes Stephen Ezell of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. "Research from U.S. corporate, academic, and government laboratories reeled off a string of transformative innovations, in everything from transistors, mobile phones, and personal computers to lasers, graphical user interfaces, search engines, the Internet, and genetic sequencing. But other countries have since closed the innovation gap, and in many cases far outpaced the United States."