politics
Duly Quoted: Tim Hudak, on the Economics of His “Million Jobs Plan”
The PC leader defends his eight-year plan against charges it's based on a major miscalculation.
“The economics [of the plan] is straightforward.”
-PC leader Tim Hudak, responding yesterday to charges that his “Million Jobs Plan” would not, in fact, create one million jobs. It seems it might produce something more like 75,000 jobs (less than the 100,000 public sector jobs he’s promised to cut)—but neither “The 75,000 Jobs Plan” nor “The -25,000 Jobs Once You Factor in Those Public Sector Cuts Plan” would be a particularly catchy title. Paul Boothe, a professor at the Ivey Business School who was also once a deputy minister in the Harper government, wrote in Macleans that “it is clear that the planners confused person-years of employment with permanent jobs”—meaning that when they developed the eight-year plan, planners counted each job eight times. Other economists agree that the planners were guilty of a major miscalculation, but Hudak continued to insist that “[p]ermanent reductions in taxes on job creators and families mean permanent jobs.”