Mark Thoma:
Economist's View: SOTU: Obama's Focus on Jobs: This is a year too late, more than that actually, but President Obama's intent to focus on jobs in the State of the Union address is welcome. The abandonment of the recommendations of the bipartisan majority on the debt-reduction commission -- for now anyway -- is also good news. This committee appeared to have Social Security in its sights mostly for ideological reasons rather than as something that would make a meaningful dent in the budget problem...What puzzles me is what a "focus on jobs" means. At one level, it means neoliberal Democratic business as usual: most of our policies are, after all, aimed at raising the productivity of and the demand for labor. But "focus on jobs" implies policies that the executive branch can do on its own or persuade congress to pass that will have a large bang, and it is not clear to me what the White House thinks those are.
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