Everyone has already gotten to the depressing story of the internal debate in the Obama Administration over jobs policy, where the choice is between doing nothing and doing next to nothing. It gets worse when you hear about the line inside the print edition of the story, from the ubiquitous senior Administration official:

“It would be political folly to make the argument that government spending equals jobs.”

Just reasoning this out, the argument is that it would be politically harmful to fix the economy. Because in fact, this is the standard macro prescription for job creation, and if you believe the stimulus worked, which everyone in the Administration is committed to believing, then you believe in standard macro.

Daniel Davies makes this as simple as you can possibly get. Sometimes the tribal warring obscures these issues too much, and everyone gets sidetracked into a conversation about taxes or protecting the safety net. Those things matter on the periphery, but this mantra should always stay at the top of mind during the lesser Depression:

The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is not that it might affect Social Security or Medicare. Even if these were totally ringfenced it would be a bad idea. The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is not that some other virtuous program might be defunded. Even if all the savings came from military procurement it would be a bad idea. The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is not that it “shrinks the state”. Even if all the deficit cuts were obtained by tax rises it would still be a bad idea. The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is not that the burden falls disproportionately on the poor. Even if the deficit were reduced specifically by taxes which only fell on the top 1% of the income distribution it would still be a bad idea.

The bad thing about cutting the federal deficit is that unemployment is very high and interest rates are very low. Given that, taxing productive activity to pay down debt is really obviously the wrong thing to do, and borrowing money to employ currently unemployed resources is really obviously the right thing to do. It would not need to be spent on “shovel-ready” projects. By definition, for purposes of expansionary fiscal policy, anything you can spend money on is shovel ready. It doesn’t have to be spent on vital infrastructure. Even completely pointless activity would be better than nothing. In some cases, even actually destructive activity, like war, has had a stimulative effect on the domestic economy.

When you hear about Democrats pushing the President to be more aggressive on jobs, they do not get this specific, and they often muddle the message. For the last year, Nancy Pelosi’s mantra in public statements has been that her caucus would only consider bills that create jobs and reduce the deficit. Those two statements are in conflict right now. There are political economy reasons to increase taxes on the rich, but again, when you’re talking about the primary problem, it’s that too many people are out of work, and interest rates are low enough to borrow money to get them to work. Maybe you want them doing productive things, but this is not a requirement.

Right now the President doesn’t agree with this. And the political team believes the public really doesn’t either. That may be true, because it has not been presented to them in the simplest possible terms.