What Would You Do to Improve Job Growth?

FROM REASON

What Would You Do to Improve Job Growth?

Reason asks economists, writers, and wonks for real ways to increase job growth

In an effort to produce real free-market ideas for boosting employment, Reason asked some of their favorite economists, writers, professors, and entrepreneurs for one concrete policy change they would recommend that would increase job growth. Here is an edited list. Link to Reason for more info:

Robert Higgs

Repeal of ObamaCare would probably do wonders to spur hiring, especially for permanent positions. Compensation for such jobs usually includes a benefits package with health care insurance, as well as a money wage or salary. Health care insurance often constitutes a major part of the employer’s cost of keeping a permanent worker on the payroll, and anything that makes this cost difficult to forecast makes employers leery to take on new workers. 

Deirdre McCloskey

"Jobs" are deals between workers and employers, and so "creating" them out of unwilling parties is impossible. The state, though, can outlaw deals, and has. So: eliminate the minimum wage for people younger than 25. The resulting boom in jobs for young people will amaze. Maybe it will inspire voters to get the state out of the job-outlawing business. Probably not, so sure are we that the state "protects" by stopping deals between willing parties.

Amity Shlaes

The single thing the U.S. could do to ensure long-term growth, including that of jobs, is to reform our Federal Reserve so that monetary policy is rules-based, not personality-based. Even a return to the gold standard would do, though it is also possible to fashion a monetary regime under which the currency is pegged to a basket of commodities. 

John Stossel

Close the Departments of Labor, Commerce, Agriculture, Energy, and HUD, then eliminate three fourths of all regulations.

Donald Boudreaux

My answer (within the realm of “remotely politically possible”) is: Replace all income taxes, including that on capital gains, with a consumption tax. But do this only if the Constitution is amended to prevent government from taxing incomes and capital gains.                     

A second, less radical, proposal is to eliminate capital gains taxes and amend the Constitution to prevent Uncle Sam from taxing personal and corporate incomes at marginal rates higher than 20 percent.

Bryan Caplan

Easy: Cut employers’ share of the payroll tax.

Bruce Bartlett

I don’t believe there is any way to increase employment significantly without raising the rate of economic growth. Therefore, the real question is how to raise economic growth. I continue to believe that the economy’s fundamental problem is a lack of aggregate demand.

I think a dose of inflation is just what the economy needs and libertarians should stop being so obsessive about it. Moreover, I think at some point they need to admit that the Fed cannot raise aggregate demand by itself when the economy is in a liquidity trap, which it obviously is based on the level of interest rates being close to zero.

Under these circumstances, I believe that some form of aggressive fiscal policy is necessary to get money circulating, raise the velocity of money, and get the economy out of a liquidity trap. I do not believe, under current circumstances, there is any type of tax cut that would achieve this goal; only direct spending by the government on purchases of goods and services will help. Therefore, the Fed will, somehow or other, have to figure out how to raise aggregate demand by itself.

Jeffrey Miron

Policymakers should stop worrying about job growth. Instead, they should focus on eliminating economic policies that impede economic efficiency—runaway entitlements, a horrendous tax code, excessive regulation, impediments to free trade, and more—and then let the job situation fix itself.

John Berlau

Repeal portions of the Bush-era Sarbanes-Oxley Act to make it easier for smaller companies to raise capital by going public, and thus expand and create thousands more jobs.

Repeal portions of last year's Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which has created hundreds of pending rules causing uncertainty and a halt in hiring for everyone from banks and credit unions to retailers and manufacturers that extend credit or hedge financial risks with derivatives.

Pass the bipartisan Small Business Lending Enhancement Act—S. 509 by Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), and in HR 1418, by Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.)—to lift the aribitrary cap on business lending by credit unions. The Credit Union National Association estimates that easing this barrier would create over 140,000 jobs in the first year and thousands more in the years after that.

Walter Olson

If I could press a button and instantly vaporize one sector of employment law, I think I'd pick age discrimination.

Ira Stoll


Congress should stop extending unemployment benefits, and better yet, restructure the unemployment insurance program or block-grant it to the states to allow them to experiment with ways of doing so. The idea is to change the program so it creates an incentive for recipients to get a job, rather than an incentive for them to remain unemployed.

Alex Tabarrok

QE3: Fed should buy lots of long term T-bonds.

Fred L. Smith

Approve the Keystone XL Pipeline: 20,000 jobs created. The 1,700 mile Keystone XL Pipeline would link expanding Canadian crude production from tar sands with America’s first-class refining hub in the Midwest and along the Gulf. The $7 billion project would roughly double U.S. imports of tar sands oil from western Canada.