It's Time To Cut The Payroll Tax

This is exactly right, from Justin Green.

Cut the payroll tax

— Justin Green (@JGreenDC) April 5, 2013

The upshot of today's bad jobs report, assuming the numbers aren't revised massively, is that the retail sector is weak, which implies a negative effect from the increase in the payroll tax that took effect at the start of the year.

And this weakness isn't just confined to March.

Here's a chart of the monthly change in retail employment. You can see that the start of this year has been much weaker than many of the numbers seen last year.

FRED

What's a good solution?

In a recent interview with Business Insider, former Obama budget chief Peter Orszag suggested a payroll tax holiday that would stay in place until the jobs market was healthy again.

We removed the holiday way too quickly.