I don't know if anyone else has said this, but payroll tax cuts are the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy. They won't do anything to solve the employment crisis, but will have dangerous side effects. Yet Trump remains obsessed with them as a cure 1/

We've lost millions of jobs, not because employers lack incentives to hire, but because many activities, like bars, indoor dining, inessential travel, elective medical care have been put on hold because of the risk of contagion 2/

Letting employers keep money they were supposed to be paying into Social Security and Medicare — no good reason to believe they'll pass the savings on to workers — does nothing to remedy this problem 3/

It will, however, undermine the finances of programs that are absolutely crucial to the lives of older Americans. If you measure the quality of policy ideas on a scale of 1 to 10, this is a minus 5 or worse 4/

Even Senate Rs consider this a terrible idea. So where's Trump getting it from? The immediate answer seems to be Stephen Moore, whose previous greatest hits include predicting that tax cuts would create a Kansas economic miracle 5/

Just a word about the other Trump "policy", on unemployment benefits. He is NOT proposing to extend supplemental benefits. He's calling for a new program, without Congressional authorization, that states are supposed to set up and provide with matching funds 6/

Two realities here: 1. The administrative capacity of state unemployment offices is stretched to the limit — it took months to provide expanded benefits, and some people never got them. They're in no position to add a new program 7/

States are also broke because of coronavirus revenue losses and expenses. Even if they could reprogram their COBOL-driven computers fast enough, they wouldn't have the money 8/

So this is policy by reality TV: an attempt to pretend that Trump is doing something, while providing no real relief for months at best. The fact is that Trump and those around him don't know how to do policy 9/