Policymakers in D.C. have a long history of focusing on the wrong problem (how many screamed about the housing bubble and buildup of private debt in the mid-2000s, for example?). This history continues today – you can’t follow economic debates taking place inside the Beltway for long without inevitably hearing somebody thunder about the “burdens we’re placing on our children and grandchildren” with current budget deficits. This formulation has become so common that almost nobody bothers questioning it anymore. But in fact, policies aimed at cutting today’s budget deficits are actually more threatening to our kids’ economic futures than these deficits themselves.

It may help to review the economic case for when one should worry about budget deficits. If the government begins running large deficits when the economy is healthy, this means that it must increase the money that it’s borrowing, essentially walking into the market for loans and sharply bidding up their demand. This increase in demand will cause interest rates (the “price” of borrowing) to rise, and these new higher prices will convince private companies to forego some investment projects that they otherwise would have undertaken. This results in a smaller capital stock and hence less-productive economy bequeathed to the next generation. Voila, generational theft!1

The responses to why these arguments do not apply to the current situation have been made many times before. The price of borrowing has not risen, and that’s not an unsustainable fluke. Instead, it’s precisely because the economy is depressed. So, no private capital formation is being crowded-out (and in fact, lots is probably being crowded-in as government deficits support spending and demand, and this spending and demand is actually the biggest near-term driver of private investment) – in fact, private-sector capital formation, after a horrendous fall during the teeth of the Great Recession, is one of the few real sources of strength in the latest recovery.

But is it really so bad that policymakers want to attack a non-existent problem (i.e., the federal budget deficit crowding-out private investment)?

Yes.

Most importantly, near-term reductions in deficits will place a substantial drag on an already-weak recovery. Given that the economy grew at less than 2 percent in 2011, this is not the time to be sharply applying the brakes.

Further, if frantic efforts to cut spending result in reductions in public investments (and they will), then something truly perverse will happen: productive investments will be sacrificed in the name of … preserving productive investments.

Take a look at estimates of the nation’s wealth (pie chart below, from the Office of Management and Budget – and note as well that near-identical estimates (see p. 195) were made by the OMB during the Bush administration):

Half of the nation’s overall capital stock consists of human capital, or education. This is largely financed publicly. And, over a third of the equipment and structures capital stock is owned publicly. In short, when figuring out the actual wealth that we’re passing on to the next generation, one must take public investments into account.

Yet, we’ve already allowed this public investment to lag in recent decades. Cutting it further today and tomorrow actually would put a burden on our children and grandchildren (unlike, say, accommodating larger budget deficits). A new EPI paper released yesterday surveys estimates of just how much we could gain by engaging in a program of expanded public investment over the next decade. It is serious money for the economy, and even the federal government itself would largely recoup the costs of this investment through tax revenues gained by the extra growth and job-generation this public investment could boost if it was undertaken while the economy was still weak. And I’ve probably even underestimated this fiscal offset in the paper.

Despite anguished cries about the fate of “our children,” it seems clear that the rush to slash spending will continue and one obvious casualty is going to be the public investments that are actually valuable to the next generation. Sadly, public investment has become a bit of a political orphan in recent decades, largely because of a mid-1990s productivity surge that happened without an increase in public investment. What this has meant is that with no constituency advertising its benefits, too many people and policymakers are genuinely unaware of the stakes in cutting it. But these stakes are large – unless coming decades see something analogous to another IT boom, we shouldn’t expect post-1995 rates of productivity growth to be sustained in the face of further public investment cutbacks.

Lastly, the target list for aiming lots of public investment funds at in coming decades is long: basic infrastructure, early-childhood education, health care, and research and development. These are pretty common areas where it’s agreed that lots of public investment money could be productively channeled. But there is also the obvious case of investments to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. There is overwhelming evidence that these are investments that should be done, and because making them would primarily benefit those children and grandchildren that policymakers in D.C. are so solicitous of, it seems like this should be a slam-dunk.

1. This is, strictly speaking, the “closed-economy” case for how deficits can harm the economy. The “open-economy” case has no more empirical support for it operating today, so we’ll skip it for now.

Apple and its key manufacturing partner, Foxconn, have been justifiably criticized for their labor practices in China, which include excessive, oppressive and illegal overtime hours, hazardous conditions, inappropriate and sometimes forced labor of 16-18 year-old student “interns” on night shifts, and wages so low that 64 percent of workers claim they don’t cover basic needs.

Many observers have remarked that with Apple’s gigantic profits, it can afford to ensure better treatment of its production workforce. A close examination of the iPhone’s cost structure leaves no doubt.

Various market researchers, including iSuppli and Horace Dediu of Asymco, have broken down the costs of the iPhone, which Apple sold to wireless carriers for an average price of $630 in the fourth quarter of 2011. All agree that Foxconn’s assembly cost— approximately $15, or 2% of the total—is a miniscule part of the iPhone’s cost. Apple’s estimated $319 profit per phone is at least 20 times the cost of producing the iPhone. In fact, because the labor cost is only part of Foxconn’s costs, which include energy, property, and its own profit, Apple’s profit per phone is more than 20 times the labor cost.

So far this year, the IRS has received 99 million tax returns and distributed an average refund of $2,794. If you still haven’t submitted your return, or filed an extension, you have until midnight to do so. Thankfully, there’s no such deadline for looking over these tax figures — as depressing as they might be:

1. The 400 highest income filers paid an average tax rate of 16.6 percent in 2007 (before the Great Recession). Dividends and net capital gains accounted for 73.4 percent of the adjusted gross income for these filers, explaining why their average effective tax rate is just a shade above the 15 percent preferential rate on unearned income.

2. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who has an estimated net worth between $190 million and $250 million, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010 on $21.7 million in income because of the carried interest loophole and the preferential tax rates on capital gains and dividends.

3. In 2011, the top 1 percent of households by cash income received 75.1 percent of the benefit from the preferential treatment of capital gains and dividends. The middle class, meanwhile, received only 3.9 percent of that benefit.

4. Over the past 35 years, Congress has gradually lowered the top tax rate on capital gains from 40 percent in 1977 to the preferential rate of 15 percent today, courtesy of the Bush-era tax cuts. The Bush tax cuts also lowered the rate on qualified dividends—previously taxed as ordinary income—from 39.6 percent to just 15 percent.

5. The Bush tax cuts cost $2.6 trillion over the last decade, accounting for roughly half of the increase in the public debt over this period, while failing to generate a robust (or even mediocre) economic recovery.

6. Roughly half of the Bush tax cuts went to the highest-income 10 percent of earners, even though these earners captured more than 90 percent of national income gains between 1979 and 2007.

7. The top 1 percent of earners received 38 percent of the Bush tax cuts, despite capturing 65 percent of income gains during the Bush economic expansion (2002-2007).

8. Continuing the Bush-era tax cuts would cost $4.4 trillion over the next decade, which would single-handedly move the country from a sustainable to unsustainable fiscal path.

9. The additional tax cuts in Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget—beyond continuing the Bush tax cuts, which would be financed with deep spending cuts—have no offset and would lose $4.6 trillion in revenue over a decade, blowing a huge hole in the budget.

10. Massive, unaffordable tax cuts were also the currency of the Republican presidential primary race, with proposed tax cuts that would lose up to $900 billion annually—which at 4.9 percent of GDP would more than double projected budget deficits under a continuation of current policies—above and beyond the costly Bush tax cuts.

Follow Andrew Fieldhouse on Twitter: @A_Fieldhouse

There’s plenty wrong with this Greg Mankiw article (see here), but one thing I haven’t seen pointed out yet [ah, here’s somebody else pointing it out, with a little less snark than this post] is the strangeness of Mankiw using his textbook as an example of fierce competition in a crowded market, unburdened by meddlesome government.

What’s strange about this? Well, what keeps me from selling PDFs of Mankiw’s textbook for $5 each online? The same thing that keeps his own students (who are, by the way, assigned this textbook by Mankiw himself; I  wonder if he’s ever once decided, based on the merits, that anybody else had a superior text on the market?) from scanning the book and passing it back and forth for free: government enforcement of copyright law.

Is having government act as a bill collector for textbook companies and authors good economic policy? Probably not, but I think it’s safe to say that textbook authors pretending as if the price tag on their books reflects only supply and demand curves functioning in perfectly competitive markets probably shouldn’t be trusted on sweeping claims about the proper role of government in determining economic outcomes.

I come from a family of penny pinchers. My parents had to support themselves at young ages, and their thriftiness put them and their children through college. Though I’m a big spender compared to my parents (it would horrify them to know I’m on a first-name basis with our local Thai food delivery guy), I’m still careful to put away money for retirement.

Despite my personal predilections, I think it’s time we reexamined our knee-jerk support for tax breaks for saving. Admittedly, it’s much harder than in my parents’ day to save your way into the middle class. For instance, a new Center for Economic and Policy Research report points out that the number of hours a minimum-wage worker has to work to pay for college has more than tripled over the past three decades. Nevertheless, it’s quite difficult to design tax incentives that actually help ordinary people save—as opposed to simply lowering taxes for high-income households.

Our tax code contains a mess of contradictory provisions that both encourage and discourage saving. These range from 529 plans for college saving to the mortgage interest deduction, which subsidizes borrowing. Among the costliest of the savings incentives are those designed to promote saving in 401(k)s, IRAs and other retirement plans. According to Treasury estimates, the present value of tax breaks for 401(k) plans alone was $83 billion in 2010 (see Table 17 here), not counting payroll tax losses.

Problematically, two-thirds of these (and other) tax breaks go to taxpayers in the top income quintile (households with roughly more than $103,000 in income in 2011). Aside from the fact that upper-income households need less help saving for retirement than low- and middle-income households, these tax breaks do little to increase saving since most high-income households already save and simply steer funds to tax-favored accounts (see footnote 27 here for an overview).1

These upper-income tax subsidies are ripe for trimming. Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, co-chairs of the president’s fiscal commission, suggested capping tax-preferred contributions to the lower of $20,000 or 20 percent of income, as well as again taxing capital gains and dividends at the same rates as ordinary income. (The two proposals are related because the value of tax deferrals for retirement saving depends on the taxes that would otherwise be paid on investment earnings.)2

Though there’s not much else to like in the Bowles-Simpson plan, 401(k) tax breaks are a good place to look for budget savings. Even better would be reducing the contribution limit to $10,000 or less, as few people can afford a $10,000 contribution, let alone $50,000 (the maximum combined employer and employee contribution). Research by two Treasury Department analysts found that reducing the total contribution limit to $10,000 would have little effect on taxpayers making less than $75,000, but that roughly 80 percent of taxpayers with incomes greater than $150,000 (and 45 percent of taxpayers with incomes between $75,000 and $150,000) would see a tax increase. Affected taxpayers in the highest income group would lose a tax break averaging $3,166, even though the $10,000 cap would reduce their 401(k) contributions by only a third, on average.

As Drexel law professor Norman Stein points out in a working paper presented at a recent University of Virginia Tax Study Group panel, supporters of the status quo offer three less-than-compelling arguments in defense of maintaining 401(k) tax breaks: that their cost is exaggerated; that encouraging employers to offer 401(k)s on behalf of highly-compensated employees indirectly helps lower-income workers even if they reap little of the tax benefit; and that these tax incentives actually cost nothing if you believe that consumption, rather than income, should be taxed. Read more

On Monday, EPI labor economist Heidi Shierholz pointed out that job growth during the current recovery has been stronger than job growth during the recovery following the 2001 recession. In addition, the jobs recovery from the Great Recession isn’t too far off the pace following the 1990 recession; private sector job growth 33 months into the 1990 recovery was 3.4 percent, while it’s 2.7 percent for the current recovery. Shierholz’s main point is that it’s the historic length and severity of the Great Recession, and not unprecedentedly poor job growth in the recovery, that explains why we’re still so far from full employment 33 months since the recession officially ended.

Greg Mankiw, however, isn’t about to highlight that fact. Mankiw, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under George W. Bush from 2003-05 and currently serves as an economic adviser to presidential candidate Mitt Romney, posted the graph below on his blog last weekend with the dismissive headline, Monitoring the So-called Recovery:

The graph shows the employment-to-population ratio (or EPOP) going back to 2004. We see the EPOP drop steeply during the Great Recession, followed by a mostly flat trajectory since. But let’s add a line to Mankiw’s graph for a direct comparison of this recovery to the last one:

It’s clear from the figure that EPOP fell much further and faster during the Great Recession than the 2001 recession. But looking to the right of the vertical line, we see that EPOP growth (or lack thereof) in the current recovery follows the same trend (i.e., flat) as the recovery after the 2001 recession. In other words, the key difference between EPOP at this point in the current recovery versus the same point in the last recovery (during which Mankiw chaired the CEA) is the length and severity of the recession that preceded them.

Yes, this recovery is slow, and certainly there is no excuse for the current complacency from policymakers about the jobs crisis, but the folks over at Angry Bear have a good adage for Mankiw: “People who live in glass houses should be careful about throwing rocks.”

With research assistance from Heidi Shierholz and Hilary Wething

In a post today, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reiterated its position that it is double-counting to argue that the Affordable Care Act both reduces the deficit and extends the life of the Medicare trust fund. Chuck Blahous, the Medicare actuary who started this mess, and Peter Suderman over at Reason agree.

Their position is wrong, wrong, wrong. First, let’s clarify the baseline. CRFB points out, correctly, that there are two baselines to choose from. The Trust Fund Baseline, which is used by Blahous, assumes that a program’s spending is constrained by the resources in its trust fund. If the trust fund is gone, the spending will automatically be cut. The Unified Budget Baseline, on the other hand, assumes that spending on programs will continue as scheduled, and the federal government will simply borrow money to ensure that benefits are not cut.

As many pointed out, the Blahous baseline is ridiculous. If spending is constrained by the trust fund, then we don’t have a problem. But the main purpose of the Affordable Care Act—heck, why we’re talking about deficit reduction in the first place!—is the assumption that we do have a problem. And even if—as CRFB states—both baselines are equally valid, it’s clear from the administration’s rhetoric that it is using the latter.

So, how can it be that a dollar can both be used to reduce the deficit and extend the trust fund? Well remember that under the baseline we’re using, program outlays aren’t constricted by the trust fund. Outlays have nothing to do with the trust fund. So therefore, extending the trust fund doesn’t cost anything, because it’s an accounting identity with no programmatic relevance.

Now, you might say that the Obama administration is being misleading, talking about extending the life of a trust fund, when under its own assumptions, the trust fund doesn’t matter. But while it may not have any impact on spending levels, it does matter for other reasons. While the size of the trust fund doesn’t determine how much spending can be done, it does potentially impact how the spending is financed. In the case of Social Security, for example, the trust fund commits income taxes (a more progressive revenue stream) in the future to redeem past surpluses financed by payroll taxes (a less progressive revenue stream); so declaring the trust fund meaningless in this case would profoundly affect the distribution of Social Security’s costs.

Trust funds also have political relevance. Even if you assume that Medicare outlays will be unaffected by the trust fund, having an insolvent trust fund opens a program up to political attacks. We’re seeing that right now with Social Security. So even if the trust fund doesn’t matter to the program’s operation, it still matters to shore of the program’s political strength. That’s something that seniors—and really anyone fond of Medicare—should care about.

On Monday, the New York Times reported on the growing groundswell to raise wages for the lowest-paid workers by increasing minimum wage rates. Legislators in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois are all looking toward raising their state minimums. At the same time, Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has introduced a bill that—among making other critical investments, strengthening worker protections, increasing tax fairness, and reducing the federal deficit—would raise the federal minimum wage to $9.80 per hour over three years and then index it to inflation.

As Table 1 shows, increasing the federal minimum wage in three steps to $9.80 per hour, as described in the Harkin bill, would raise the wages of 28 million Americans. About 19.5 million workers whose wages are between the current minimum and the proposed $9.80 rate would be directly affected. Another 8.9 million whose wages are just above the proposed minimum would also see a pay increase through “spillover” effects as employers adjust their overall pay scales.

Table 1

Workers affected by proposed federal minimum wage increase

Federal minimum increased to $9.80 per hour in three increases of 85 cents, modeled for July 2012, 2013, and 2014
Total estimated workers in third year*	127,361,000
Directly affected**	19,485,000
Indirectly affected***	8,869,000
Total (directly & indirectly) affected	28,354,000

*Total estimated workers is estimated from the CPS respondents for whom either a valid hourly wage is reported or one can be imputed from weekly earnings and average weekly hours. Consequently, this estimate tends to understate the size of the full workforce.

**Directly Affected workers will see their wages rise as the new minimum wage rate will exceed their current hourly pay.

***Indirectly affected workers currently have a wage rate just above the new minimum wage (between the new minimum wage and the new minimum wage plus the dollar amount of the increase). They will receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward to reflect the new minimum wage.

Source: EPI Analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey, Outgoing Rotation Group

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Table 2 highlights some demographic characteristics of the affected workers. Fifty-four percent are women and 54 percent work full-time. The overwhelming majority (87.9 percent) are at least 20 years old. This may come as a surprise to some, as minimum-wage workers are often portrayed as teenagers working part-time. The reality is that only 12 percent of those who would be affected by the raise are teenagers and only 15 percent work fewer than 20 hours per week.

Table 2

Demographic characteristics of affected workers

	Directly affected*	Indirectly affected**	Total affected	% of total affected
Total	19,485,262	8,868,654	28,353,916	100.0%
Female	10,924,035	4,527,632	15,451,666	54.5%
Male	8,561,228	4,341,022	12,902,250	45.5%
Part-time (<20hrs/week)	3,327,498	918,690	4,246,187	15.0%
Mid-time (20-34hrs/week)	6,599,616	2,167,363	8,766,979	30.9%
Full-time (35+ hrs/week)	9,558,149	5,782,601	15,340,750	54.1%
Age 20 +	16,509,188	8,421,003	24,930,191	87.9%
Under 20	2,976,074	447,651	3,423,725	12.1%
White	10,959,722	4,960,138	15,919,860	56.1%
African American	2,741,079	1,285,583	4,026,662	14.2%
Hispanic	4,654,719	2,035,908	6,690,626	23.6%
Asian	1,129,742	587,025	1,716,767	6.1%

*Directly Affected workers will see their wages rise as the new minimum wage rate will exceed their current hourly pay.

**Indirectly affected workers currently have a wage rate just above the new minimum wage (between the new minimum wage and the new minimum wage plus the dollar amount of the increase). They will receive a raise as employer pay scales are adjusted upward to reflect the new minimum wage.

Source: EPI Analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey, Outgoing Rotation Group

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Furthermore, low-wage workers tend to spend rather than save an additional dollar earned, often because they have little other choice. The additional  household consumption generated by this boost to low-wage workers’ paychecks would benefit the labor market as a whole, because  the resulting economic activity translates into job growth. After controlling for a reduction in corporate profits resulting from the minimum wage increase, and assuming some of the business expense of paying higher wages is passed on to consumers, the net effect of the proposed minimum wage increase is an increase in economic activity of over $25 billion over the next three years, which would generate roughly 100,000 new jobs.

Table 3

Economic effects of proposed federal minimum wage increase

Federal minimum increased to $9.80 per hour in three increases of 85 cents, modeled for July 2012, 2013, and 2014
Increased wages for directly & indirectly affected*	$39,677,170,000
GDP Impact**	$25,115,648,697
Jobs Impact***	103,000

*Increased wages: Total amount of increased wages for directly and indirectly affected workers.

**GDP and job stimulus figures utilize a national model to estimate the GDP impact of workers' increased earnings, after controlling for reductions to corporate profits.

***The jobs impact total represents full-time equivalent employment.The increased economic activity from additional wages adds not just jobs but also hours for people who already have jobs. Full-time employment takes that into account, by essentially taking the number of total hours added (including both hours from new jobs and more hours for people who already have jobs) and dividing by 40, to get full-time-equivalent jobs added. Jobs numbers assume full-time employment requires $115,000 in additional GDP.

Source: EPI Analysis of 2011 Current Population Survey, Outgoing Rotation Group. Job impact estimation methods can be found in: Hall, Doug and Gable, Mary. 2012. The benefits of raising Illinois' minimum wage. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Insitutute; and Bivens, Josh L. 2011. Method memo on estimating the jobs impact of various policy changes. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute.

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In a historical context, the increase proposed by the Harkin bill is long overdue. As John Schmitt and Janelle Jones at the Center for Economic and Policy Research explain, the real value of the minimum wage is far below its historical levels, despite the fact that the low-wage workforce is older and better educated than ever before. Congress has had to raise the minimum wage 17 times since its peak value in 1968 in order to combat inflation. Indexing the minimum wage, as 10 states have already done, would fix this problem once and for all.

The lingering effects of the recession make this an even more critical time to raise the wage floor. Even as employment has slowly picked up in the recovery, wage growth is still painfully weak. Moreover, recent reports show that low-wage work has been driving much of the recent job growth. (This also means that the figures here may actually understate the number of people who would be affected by an increase in the federal minimum.)  The Harkin bill, and similar state proposals, would give much-needed help to these workers and provide additional stimulus to the U.S. economy – all without costing anything to taxpayers.

In all seriousness, when did singlehandedly “fixing the deficit” become a necessary criterion for each and every tax and budget policy proposal? David Fahrenthold and David Nakamura invoke this strange new rule in an article in today’s Washington Post.

“Neither [the Paul Ryan budget nor the Buffett Rule] will fix the deficit problem anytime soon: The GOP’s proposal wouldn’t balance the budget until 2040. By itself, the Buffett Rule wouldn’t do it ever.”

There is a lot wrong in this sentence.

First, comparing a comprehensive budget proposal to a single tax reform is an apples-to-oranges (or apple-to-bushel-of-apples) comparison. Second, the Ryan budget doesn’t actually balance the budget until … well ever. The too-often cited Congressional Budget Office’s long-term analysis evoked here is based on the false premise that revenue will magically hold at 19 percent of GDP, ignoring the trillions of dollars of budget-busting, gimmicky tax cuts (Ryan assures that this money and more can be made up by “broadening the base” of taxation but offers no specifics). Lastly, nobody invokes the Buffett Rule as the single instrument for balancing the budget—very few fiscal policies have that reach. Take an extreme example: Immediately abolishing the Department of Defense would not balance the budget within a decade, relative to current policies. That’s besides the point–cutting more than $7 trillion in non-interest spending over a decade would produce a sustainable fiscal trajectory (ignoring sizable second-order cyclical budget effects from the massive hit to aggregate demand). The trajectory for debt held by the public is the relevant metric of fiscal sustainability, not a binary for budget deficit/budget surplus.

Fahrenthold and Nakamura double-down on brushing off non-trivial budgetary savings, also missing the broader fiscal implications of the Buffett Rule: “Even if it passed, the [Buffett Rule] would not likely make a serious dent in the country’s deficit. It might add up to $162 billion over 10 years. The national debt grows fast enough to wipe that out within two months.”

So $162 billion in budgetary savings is something to laugh at? I’ll remember that next time conservatives propose to reduce the deficit by drug-testing unemployment insurance recipients, eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, or defunding Planned Parenthood. To be more concrete, these savings would more than supplant the draconian $134 billion 10-year cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) proposed in the Ryan budget.

Further, the criticism that $162 billion is dwarfed by this year’s budget deficit is doubly misleading. For one, budget deficits have swelled in recent years because the economy is so weak. Comparing a 10-year cost-estimate of just about anything to the sizable but cyclical budget deficits spurred by the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression is unhelpful. Further, policymakers shouldn’t be concerned at all with reducing this year’s budget deficit; serious concerns about budget imbalance are about stabilizing debt in the medium and long-term, after the economy has recovered. Revenue from implementing the Buffett Rule would be weighted toward the out years, where savings will be larger relative to projected budget deficits than today, and that’s exactly how it should be.

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) echoed this very same misguided sentiment in a statement on the Buffett Rule: “The President’s so-called Buffett Rule is a dog that just won’t hunt. It was designed for no other reason than politics – there is no economic rationale for it. It would do little to bring down the debt…” This specious “if it doesn’t fix the entire problem, it’s not worth doing,” objection to raising more revenue and increasing tax progressivity was similarly trotted out in defense of the upper-income Bush-era tax cuts, the expiration of which would raise $849 billion over a decade. Luckily, Jon Stewart decided to smack at this bad argument. He probably won’t have time to go after this latest Washington Post article, which is a shame because it’s about as silly.

The National Journal’s Jim Tankersley correctly points out that the Buffett Rule will not, by itself, solve the most pressing economic problem in front of us: the still far too high unemployment rate. Then, bizarrely for Beltway writers talking about the unemployment rate, he also correctly points out what would help lower this rate: increased aggregate demand.

But it doesn’t follow from here that the Buffett Rule is bad policy. In fact, for those who think that we should aggressively target a lower unemployment rate in the near-term while also simultaneously locking in commitments to reduce longer-run budget deficits, the Buffett Rule should be seen as a huge win. However, this is if (and only if) it is accompanied in the next couple of years with aggressive fiscal job-creation measures such as infrastructure spending, aid to states and local governments, and making sure that existing fiscal support (unemployment insurance, food stamps, targeted tax cuts) does not fade away.

Of course, I’m not one of those who think we must only pair near-term measures to lower unemployment with longer-term measures to close the deficit. I’d be happy to take the near-term measures, well, in the near-term and deal with longer-run issues when we can.

And, in fact, it would be optimal from a pure economics perspective to finance aggressive near-term fiscal support with debt in the short-term, rather than (even Buffett Rule-rule style) tax increases. But given the near-universally misplaced D.C. obsession with closing budget deficits, always and everywhere, financing job-creation efforts with the Buffett Rule and other high-income tax cuts makes plenty of sense to me.

Permanent tax increases on upper-income households provide very little drag on near-term recovery, whereas the intelligently-directed fiscal supports noted above have quite large effects. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi pegs the fiscal multiplier (i.e., the increase in GDP stemming from a dollar of spending increases or tax cuts) for infrastructure spending at $1.44, versus $0.35 for permanently extending all the Bush-era tax cuts. This implies that a dollar of infrastructure investment financed by a dollar of permanent tax increases would generate on net $1.09 in economic activity (a balanced-budget-multiplier).

Tankersley  concludes his piece, “If the Buffett Rule was a serious pitch to help the jobless, it would deal with one of those main drivers of unemployment. It would boost persistently weak aggregate demand or incentivize business investment.”

Nobody agrees with this general sentiment more than us at EPI – really. But given the mad rush to cut deficits, throwing the Buffett Rule on the table seems awfully smart. It minimizes short-run damage to jobs and growth from reducing the deficit, it can be paired with effective fiscal support to yield extra economic activity and jobs without increasing the deficit, and it locks in a policy that will make our tax system fairer, more efficient, and capable of generating the revenue needed to fund government in the long-run.