Cut the Payroll Tax

Joseph Weisenthal fingers the payroll tax hike for the bad jobs data:

It'd be nice to blame the sequester (the automatic spending cuts that started in March) but it doesn't even appear to be about that.

A series of tweets from WaPo's Zachary Goldfarb points out that this really more likely to be about the expiry of the Payroll Tax Holiday (as the job losses fell in the retail sector) rather than the sequester (seeing as there was not a big decline in professional services).

So why not cut the payroll tax? It helps struggling families, revives the retail sector, gives President Obama a bit of the stimulus he's been requesting, and gives an opening to begin shifting the tax burden from labor to consumption. All of these are good things. So let's do it.

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Justin Green

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