South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Mark Thoma of Economist’s View assesses the future of the labor market and “gives up” on policymakers …

I’ve been pushing hard for more help for labor markets for quite awhile — at times I’ve thought it was a bit repetitive, but necessary — but it’s probably time for me to give up and accept that we are going to have a slower recovery than we could have had with more aggressive fiscal policy. Unless there is a dramatic reversal of recent indications that we are at the beginning of a recovery, Congress is not going to provide anything more than token help from here forward.
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Because monetary policy loses effectiveness in a deep recession — something I’ve been teaching for decades — I was among the first to call for aggressive fiscal policy. Fiscal policy creates demand directly, it does not rely upon incentives and the hope that people will respond to them. When the crisis hit, we needed fiscal policy right away. Given the lags between changes in policy and actual effects on the economy, which were known to be lengthy, and given that monetary policy was not going to be enough, there was no time to “wait and see” (as many people I respect were calling for). But the reality is that fiscal policy didn’t get put into place until much, much later, far too late to stop the worst of the downturn (and it wasn’t big enough anyway)…
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But, as I said at the beginning, even though it’s not too late for more help to make a difference, it’s not going to happen. Now that the recovery seems to have started and the budding optimism is apparent, we will turn our attention elsewhere, to financial reform, to global warming, and to other issues. We’ll forget about all the people who could have been working, but instead have to hope Congress doesn’t cut off their unemployment insurance before they can find a job.