Sen. Kyl Gets One Right: This Ain't A Jobs Bill

The possibility exists for the Senate to pass a bipartisan jobs bill. It just won't do much to create jobs.

The Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl, typically a fountain of misinformation, gets this one right in Bloomberg: "Kyl ... said Democrats shouldn’t advertise the package as jobs legislation because it’s just 'extending a bunch of tax policy and related items that we need to do.'"

The Los Angeles Times explains in more detail: "...the cornerstone would be a proposal to give businesses that hire unemployed workers this year an exemption from the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax ... Other provisions of the bill are, for the most part, expansions or extensions of existing policies."

This is certainly better than nothing. But it can't be sold as anything close to real solution to the jobs crisis, lest you want to set the public up to be deeply disappointed.

The jobs tax credit idea has some potential, but not on it's own. As my OurFuture.org Isaiah Poole noted yesterday, what is preventing businesses from hiring is

The EPI comprehensive jobs strategy, for example, includes a tax credit for new hires. But it's the 5th leg of the stool, along with other measures that would bolster demand: public sector hiring, state government aid to stem layoffs and investments in schools and transportation.

I can appreciate, perhaps more than most of my liberal brethren, the political need at this moment for Democrats to pass something with a bipartisan sheen on it -- just to show ornery independents it can done and they want to work across the aisle when possible.

But at the same time, it can also be made clear that the desire for bipartisanship is not as great as the necessity to address our many crises: including health care costs, greenhouse gas pollution and the loss of 8.4 million jobs in two years.

We must do all we can to fight for a bigger jobs bill. You can tell your Senators what to do by clicking here.

But the passage of a tiny bipartisan jobs bill is also an opportunity to show how feeble our response to crises will continue to be if we make superficial bipartisanship a higher priority than strong policy action.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future