Yesterday I observed that Republican congresspeople literally are not offering any substantive ideas to create jobs.
Now, leading Republicans are coalescing around an substantive idea … for the Federal Reserve to stop trying to create jobs.
It is currently the law for the Federal Reserve to pursue that both restrain inflation and full employment. The Fed’s recent
move to buy $600 billion of government debt was intended to lower longer-term interest rates and spur job growth.
Seeing the Fed try to create jobs has been too much for leading Republicans to take. Now they are demanding we strip the Fed of its mandate to strive for full employment.
House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Mike Pence is introducing legislation to strop the Fed of its jobs mandate, and his call was echoed by Senate Banking Committee member Bob Corker. The Huffington Post reports the Sen. Minority Leader McConnell signaled his support, and that incoming House Budget Committee Chair Rep. Paul Ryan has long held the anti-jobs position.
We already knew nearly every Republican opposed the Congress using fiscal policy to create jobs. Now we know they oppose the Fed using monetary policy to create jobs.
As economist Mark Thoma noted yesterday, that’s it. That covers everything government can do to create jobs. Republicans simply oppose using the tools of government to create jobs.
I would be less offended by this position if they just copped to it.
It would be far more honest for conservative Republicans to say: We don’t believe government should do anything for jobs. Recessions happen. People lose their jobs. If they couldn’t figure out how to stay employed, that’s their problem.
Instead, conservative Republicans are claiming they want to create jobs, but just aren’t bothering to offer any policy ideas that have any remote connection to the creation of jobs.
Just repeating over and over that “getting government out the way” magically creates jobs doesn’t even qualify as an argument, especially after what we saw in the last decade.
And now that Republicans are raising the ante, coming up with policy ideas to make it harder for our government to help government jobs, it’s way past time someone press conservatives to explain how is it exactly they plain to follow through on their promise to help create jobs.
