No Easy Way to Create Jobs

I have said before that nobody in politics really knows how to create good, permanent jobs (except maybe the Germans!).  Mostly, it's just political talk, because we've gotten into this mess over decades, and it's going to take a long time to get out of it, if we ever do.  Here's something on that idea from the NYT:

One reason we have so few ideas about job creation is that up until recently, the U.S. economy had been growing so well for so long that few economists spent much time studying it. With no new theories, Democrats dusted off the big idea from the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes’s view that government can create jobs by spending a lot of money. The stimulus, however, has to be borrowed, and it has to be really, truly huge — probably something like $1.5 or $2 trillion — to fill the gap between where the economy is and where it would be if everyone was spending at pre-recession levels. The goal is to goad consumers into spending again. And President Obama’s jettisoned $400 billion jobs package, hard-core Keynesians argue, is nowhere near what it would take to persuade them.

Many Republicans follow the more fiscally conservative University of Chicago School, which argues that Keynesian stimulus can’t heal a sick economy — only time can. Chicagoans believe that economies can only truly recover on their own and that policy interventions only slow the recovery. It’s a puzzle of modern politics that Republicans have had electoral success with a policy that fundamentally asserts there is nothing the government can do to create jobs any time soon.

Of course, Romney, Perry, Herman Cain and the rest won’t come out and say, “If elected, I will tell you to wait this thing out.” Instead, Republican candidates fill their jobs plans with Chicagoan ideas that have nothing to do with the current crisis, like permanent cuts in taxes and regulation. These policies may (or may not) make the economy healthier in 5 years or 10, but the immediate impact would require firing a large number of America’s roughly 23 million government workers.

Keynesians and Chicagoans, however, do agree on two important points. First, in economics, unlike politics, there’s no middle ground: You can’t simultaneously cut and increase government budgets. The only shot we have at truly transforming our economy is a one-party sweep in the 2012 elections that would lead to radical legislative changes. Still, either path — lots more debt or lots of fired government workers — will only inflame more Americans.

The second area of agreement is the most important: an economy is truly healthy only when its people know how to make and do things that others will pay them a decent amount for. Jobs, in other words, are not the cause of a healthy economy; they’re the byproduct. And that’s another thing most national politicians know but will never say.