The Government Creates Jobs

jaredbernsteinblog.com — There are a few things politicians of all stripes say that should drive you as nuts as they drive me.  One I’ve been inveighing against since OTE was born is the bass akwards formulation: “just like families, the federal government must tighten its belt in hard times” (the subject of one of my first posts).  This one’s particularly invidious both because it makes folksy sense and because it’s precisely because families are tightening that the public sector, specifically to federal gov’t, needs to loosen. But challenging that damaging aphorism for first place is this common point of agreement between politicians as diverse as Obama and Romney: the government doesn’t create jobs. That’s not just patent nonsense.  It’s economically damaging in lots of ways. Every month the jobs report prints the numbers showing that this assertion is off by, at last count, 22 million or 16% of total payrolls.

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