Jeff Merkley continues to be one of my very favorite senators:
“We need to have every proposal that the super-committee brings out to have it scored by its jobs impact,” Merkley told me in an interview this morning. He plans to urge Democratic and GOP leaders to agree to this standard, and hopes to build a campaign to make it happen.
There’s precedent for the CBO scoring proposals for jobs impact. You can find examples of that here, here, and here. As Merkley notes, Congress normally submits proposals for budgetary impact but Congress can request jobs impact evaluations.
This is an excellent idea. Reducing the long-term budget deficit is a good thing to do, but Congress needs to make sure they don’t stomp even harder on a delicate labor market in the course of trying to do it.
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