Megan McArdle promotes job creation tax credits for the long-term unemployed

A very good idea, and one I strongly support too.

It's not the only idea McArdle considers... she has another one, but ends up reconsidering: "The only government solution to long-term unemployment we've ever found was to have World War II, and for various reasons, we're probably not going to reauthorize that particular program."

I think "for various reasons" gets the Understatement of the Day Award.

This gives me an opportunity to toot my own horn, too. I got accepted to present empirical work I've done on Georgia's Job Creation Tax Credit at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Fall Conference in Washington in early November. This has been in the works for a long time - I'm doing a regression discontinuity design evaluation of the impact of the program. I'm still tweaking it, and hoping to get feedback on further tweaks - but generally the impacts look positive. I definitely am going to want to write this up and submit somewhere, and the conference will help kick my butt into doing it.

A random factoid: Martin Luther King was a fan of job creation tax credits.