At a certain point trading jobs stimulus money for deficit reduction is silly, if all things are equal, why even bother? Now of course if 50 billion a year (10 yrs/500 billion) in deficit cuts were traded for 500 billion in jobs stim for 1 year, that might be palatable, Jobs directly created will support secondary job creation in the outgoing years, and this might outweigh the total contraction of 500 billion in spending cuts over 10 years.
But if we have trade deals that promote outsourcing, and say we lose a million jobs, and we have to put the trade deals on the table to get job stim on the table, to create a million jobs, where is the net improvement?
Sure if we get the jobs in the front end and we lose jobs over a many years, I guess thats better than nothing. But why bother? Looking at the scale of the problem we need 15 million jobs, and we could really use 20 million jobs.
Horse trading to get a million or 2-3 million jobs is a pittance in the big picture, and what we have to do to get jobs stim into the deal may mute the effect of the stimulus. I am cautiously optimistic that President Obama has started talking about jobs, and has recently made some seemingly solid proposals.
Moving forward, lets see how much job stim we get and lets see what the price is that we have to pay to get it. If John Boehner continues with the GOP pattern of wanting austerity, spending cuts, less regulation and lower taxes, then the efficacy of the stimulus is going to at least in part wasted against the contraction of austerity.