Education Quote by Janet Napolitano

Strip away the technocratic nouns and you can hear the argument hiding in plain sight: stop treating workers like a line item and start treating the conditions around work as the real competitive weapon. Napolitano is making a politician's version of a CFO pitch, reframing what counts as "pro-business" policy. Labor costs, in this framing, are the lazy metric - the blunt instrument companies used to justify chasing cheap wages. The smarter play, she suggests, is choosing places that function: ports that move goods, networks that move data, schools that produce competence, capital markets that let firms scale, rules that are stable enough to plan around.

The intent is coalition-building. By praising "smart businesses", she flatters the private sector while nudging it toward public investments it doesn't always want to pay for. "Market access" and "transportation" are code for trade corridors and logistics - a quiet reminder that globalization isn't just ideology, it's infrastructure. "Telecommunications" signals the post-industrial economy, where bandwidth matters as much as highways. "Education and skill level" is the human-capital case for immigration, workforce training, and universities without naming any of those flashpoints directly.

Then there's the stealthiest phrase: "the regulatory market". It's a way to concede that regulation is part of competition, not its opposite. She's not promising deregulation; she's selling predictability and competence - the idea that rules can be an asset if they lower risk.

Contextually, this sits in the era when American politics was trying to answer offshoring and regional decline without sounding anti-market. The subtext: if you want jobs, stop racing to the bottom and start building a place worth locating in.