*Forget about the quickie tax gimmicks - they don't create jobs

Politicians are desperate to concoct short-term tax plans of all kinds (cut 'em, freeze 'em, incentivize 'em), but they seldom work very well, if at all. The only thing they're really good at is lopping off potential tax revenues, which in turn raise budget deficits even higher (although no one usually notices until many months down the line and by then it's on to the next budget-cutting crisis). From NYT columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin:

"Tax policy is not a great lever for adjusting short-term growth," explained Howard Gleckman, a resident fellow at the Tax Policy Center , who has reviewed dozens of studies on the subject. Most temporary tax holidays "reward people for what they are going to do anyway," he said, adding that "the bang for the buck is very low -- you're subsidizing companies that were already going to hire."

A seminal study by John H. Bishop and Mark Montgomery that looked at the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit bill from 1977, which was aimed at temporarily giving employers an incentive to hire disadvantaged workers, showed that "at least 70 percent of the tax credits were claimed for hiring workers who would have been hired even in the absence of the tax credit." Companies claimed more than $4.5 billion in credits as a result.

The push for quickie tax gimmicks is one more example of how cockeyed the economic narrative has become. Folks, there is painfully little that government can do to create jobs, though there's quite a bit it can do to thoroughly mess up the economy (something it's now doing brilliantly).

*A more nuanced take from the Washington Post's Ezra Klein:

Politicians all over the world are finding themselves stuck in the same vise: The policies needed to help the economy now, like spending in America and further fiscal integration in Europe, are unpopular. Pass them and you might lose your job. But letting the economy worsen is also unpopular. Let that happen and you will lose your job. So governments around the world have tried to walk the middle path. In America, we had a stimulus that was bigger than anything we had seen before, but still only a half-to-a-third of what was needed to close the output gap. The result? No depression, but a prolonged period of high unemployment. In Europe, there has been more fiscal integration than the world ever imagined possible, but it has not been enough to actually solve the continent's debt crises -- or the various governments' political problems.