Politico receives its share of scorn, most of it richly deserved. The columnists dwell on cocktail circuit trivialities, their attention spans are short, and their insights are conventional, to be generous. Ideas that take more than a paragraph to express are not their forte.
But let me point you to a collaborative column by David Walker, former head of the Government Accountability Office and a deficit hawk, and Lawrence Mishel, President of the liberalish Economic Policy Institute, which is running on Politico right now.
President Barack Obama is in a difficult position when it comes to deficits. Today's high deficits will have to go even higher to help address unemployment. At the same time, many Americans are increasingly concerned about escalating deficits and debt. What's a president to do?
The answer, from a policy perspective, is not that hard: A focus on jobs now is consistent with addressing our deficit problems ahead.
The difficulty is that many politicians and news organizations often cast deficit debates as a dichotomy: You either care about them or you don’t.
But this is rarely accurate. The fact that the two of us, who have philosophical differences on the proper role of government, find much to agree on about deficits is a testament to the importance of dropping this useless dichotomy and finally talking about deficits in a reasonable way.
As in every economic downturn, federal revenues have fallen steeply because individuals and corporations earn less in a recession. High unemployment also results in higher expenditures for safety net programs, like Medicaid, unemployment benefits and food stamps.
Not surprisingly then, a huge recession can yield a huge deficit. Efforts to put people back to work and help restore the economy, like the recovery package passed last February, can also increase short-term deficits.
[snip]
That’s why we agree that job creation must be a short-term priority. Job creation plans must be targeted so we can get the greatest return on investment. They must be timely, creating jobs this year and next. And they must be big enough to substantially fill the enormous jobs hole we’re in. They must also be temporary — affecting the deficit only in the next couple of years, without exacerbating our large and growing structural deficits in later years.
Funding key investment and infrastructure projects to promote economic growth and offering a job creation tax credit are among the policy ideas that meet all these standards. In addition, temporarily renewing extended unemployment benefits can lead to more jobs throughout the economy.
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