Sarah Carey has an article in today’s Irish Times which follows up on the discussions on this site about job subsidies.
One point I had meant to make in yesterday’s post about job subsidies but forgot to was the following. Beyond the fact that these programs are expensive and known to be ineffective at reducing unemployment, it remains the case that, whatever agreement the government comes to with the unions, the fiscal situation remains the same (I am discounting arguments here that these schemes pay for themselves because we know they don’t.) I doubt if the government will change its plans for the budget deficit by one cent if it adopts this plan.
So if we spend €250 million (or a €1 billion) on these schemes we will undoubtedly have to find a corresponding €250 million in tax increases or, more likely, spending cuts to offset them. These measures will themselves have a negative effect on aggregate demand and thus unemployment.
This comes back to the point I made in my post on stimulus. In the current environment, spending measures like this need to be evaluated according to balanced-budget multipliers (i.e. factoring in the negative effects of the taxes that need to be raised or other spending that needs to be cut to pay for them.) With so many difficult cuts in public spending ahead of us, why put ourselves deeper in the hole by adding an extra €250 million (€60 for every man, woman and child in the country) just to pay for a program that doesn’t help much.
The long-mooted job subsidy plan appears to be about to happen, though as is often the case in Ireland, the public can only learn about this through leaked details from social partnership talks, rather than through the publication for discussion of detailed government proposals.