"A Million Jobs at Stake" is the headline on a Times editorial that opposes cuts in government spending and proposes tax increases as an alternative. The editorial says:
the coming job losses could be sharply reduced if half or more of the spending cuts were replaced by revenue increases, as President Obama and Congressional Democrats have demanded. That would lower the amount of spending pulled out of the economy to bring down the deficit, replacing the cuts with taxes from the rich or companies with high cash reserves that are less likely to spend it.
The money could be raised by eliminating tax loopholes for energy companies, hedge fund managers and other high-end recipients of federal largess, but Republicans won't even consider the idea…. Americans are about to find out what happens when an entire political party demands deficit reduction at all costs, because those costs will be enormous.
Got that? The Times claims that a $41 billion tax increase in 2013 (on top of the tax increase that was already put through, which amounts to more than $1 trillion over 10 years if you include the expiration of the payroll tax break) would "lower the amount of spending pulled out of the economy to bring down the deficit."
This makes no sense, notwithstanding the Times claim that the money would come "from the rich or companies with high cash reserves that are less likely to spend it." Does the Times consider the rich and companies with high cash reserves to be somehow not part of the economy, while the government is part of the economy?
If the Times is really against "deficit reduction at all costs," the editorialists should favor keeping both government spending and taxation at current levels. But the editorial seems to support deficit reduction; it just wants to pursue that goal via tax increases rather than spending reductions, or, at least, by a formula that includes more in the way of tax increases, and less in the way of spending reductions. The Times' argument (to the extent there is one) is that the government will "spend" the money but the rich or companies with high cash reserves won't spend it, and that the result of the government spending will be more jobs. But there's not a lot of evidence for that theory, or, if there is, it's certainly not cited by the Times in the editorial. Plenty of rich individuals use their money by investing it in ways that create jobs, and companies do, too. The higher taxes on energy companies that the Times recommends could mean fewer energy-industry jobs. The basic Times assumption is that politicians in Washington will spend money more wisely than will the individuals who have the money now, whose taxes the Times wants to raise. It's nice to see the Times weighing in against the defense cuts, I suppose, but it's not a particularly strong case.