Investing in Schools Creates More Than Twice as Many Jobs as Military Spending:

Investing in Schools Creates More Than Twice as Many Jobs as Military Spending

Bob Pollin: Education spending is the best job creator - so why are local and state governments firing teachers and closing schools? -   June 9, 13

JAISAL NOOR, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jaisal Noor in Baltimore. And welcome to this week's edition of The PERI Report.

Now joining us is Bob Pollin. He's the founder and codirector of the PERI institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. His latest book is Back to Full Employment.

Thank you for joining us, Bob.

ROBERT POLLIN, CODIRECTOR, POLITICAL ECONOMY RESEARCH INSTITUTE: Thanks very much for having me on.

NOOR: So, Bob, the Labor Department just announced that productivity growth is going to be weaker than expected, and some are going to argue that this growth is temporary and that we need to focus on austerity measures. What's your response?

POLLIN: My response is austerity was not the right program a month ago, it wasn't the right program six months ago, and it certainly isn't the right program today and into the future.

As we've talked about in a lot of previous instalments of this, we now know from our own research here in PERI that the single most important piece of research in support of the austerity agenda, by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard, was wrong. It's just wrong as a piece of research, this notion that when government's public debt exceeds 90 percent of the country's GDP, that we are going to experience precipitous declines in economic growth. Our own paper showed that to be wrong, and so that the argument for austerity based on public debt coming up against that threshold is no longer valid.

Now, at the same time, we have other kinds of evidence in both Europe and the United States now that also weakens the argument for austerity. For example, we have the evidence from both the U.S. Social Security Trust Fund and the Medicare Trust Fund that the finances in both cases are not facing the kind of dire