"The Get America Working! approach would work, in effect, by correcting a major price distortion. The current U.S. Internal Revenue Code taxes employment far more heavily than it does the use of natural resources. This distortion has grown progressively worse as payroll taxes have grown. Revising this distortion would increase employment, equity and overall economic vigor importantly. And it would do so by responding to market price signals, not through clumsy and expensive government interventions."
How Much Job Creation is Enough? (Hint: Add a Zero)
Date:
Wed, 06/09/2010
Source:
Huffington Post
The May jobs report illustrates the mismatch between the magnitude of our unemployment problem and the incremental policy levers Washington is pulling to respond to it.
In recent months we have had a nice break from the grim relativity of less catastrophic job losses, but it's a far cry from the upbeat rhetoric we hear whenever the numbers tick up. In March, when census hiring kicked in and pent up labor demand left over from the snows of February combined to post modest jobs gains, Treasury Secretary Geitner said, "we're just on the verge now of ... a sustained period of job creation, finally."
But that verge keeps receding. This week Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said un- employment "will stay high for some time." We're still barely creating any jobs relative to the millions of unemployed who need them. Of the 431,000 new jobs counted in the May report, 411,000 were government census jobs, which will shortly disappear. Our current trajectory of job loss vs. job recovery is worse than the early eighties, worse than 1948, worse in fact than anytime since the Depression. (More)
