Thanks. It confirmed something I suspected, that people who make too big a deal of growth specifically in terms of the deficit are engaging in a left laffer curve. Growth has a lot of benefits (and I know many would destructive consequences too) but how it affects the deficit is modest compared to other causes.
Interestingly enough, if health care costs per person were at say German levels (let alone French levels) the whole Bush era, and the Obama era through 2009 and would have run a modest surplus, with surpluses some year and deficits others but overall paying down the dept over time. The debt would only have started increasing again in 2010...
Health care costs are a huge part of government expenditures - both through direct expenditure on Medicare, Medicaid, health care for govt. employees and so on, but huge tax deductions not only from income tax, but from health benefits not being counted as FICA income.
Cut health care spending almost half (which is the per capita German level compared to us in PPP terms) and not only is direct spending reduced, but less expensive privately paid health care equals fewer deductible expenses. Some of the figures are very rough - I could only find income tax medical expenditures in nominal dollars and had to use an index to deflate or inflate to 2005 dollars. I could only find FICA medical expenditures for 2007, and simply made the assumption that ratio of FICA medical expenditures to income tax expenditures was the same in other years. I'm sure the actual ratio varies, but I think it is close enough for this type of calculation.
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>
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> On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 6:34 AM, Gar Lipow <gar.lipow at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I find the following statistic various places "Adding 1 million jobs
>> cuts deficit by 54 billion". For example:
>> http://www.ourfiscalsecurity.org/deficit-101. As a source in turn it
>> links to
>> http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2009/pdf/hist.pdf
>> which is 342 pages, and does not contain that statistic as far as
>> intensive searching can determine. Nor does further searching turn it
>> up.
>>
>> I know x jobs = x deficit reduction is pretty crude. After all what
>> kind of job matters among other things. Still someone must have come
>> up with some rough estimate somewhere - either the 1 million jobs
>> equal 54 billion in deficit reduction or some other number. Help on
>> this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
>>
>> --
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