What Is Holding Back Employment Growth?

Krugman offers a simple, straight-forward explanation:

 Businesses aren’t hiring because of poor sales, period, end of story

James Hamilton at Econbrowser disagrees, citing Russ Robert's specious contention that the twin problems are  taxation and regulation.  You can stop laughing now.  Roberts is from Cafe Hayek, and I've ridiculed him here before, though with the snark dialed down a bit, for me.  (And his response was quite gracious - I do admire that.)    Hamilton also displays Catherine Rampell's now notorious graph, though it's not at all clear that he read her text.  (I'm not going to reproduce it here.  It's in the links, and if you haven't seen it, you don't read anything about econ.)

All this set off an interesting and quite spirited comment string, where I was one of the commenters, natch.

My comments are brilliant, of course, but many others are also worth reading, (Johnathon's are particularly informative)  even those from the right-wingers - though mainly for their illustrative sheer wrongitude.  Interesting also, that total strangers had my back against some of the sillier contrary comments.  So I made sense, other than just to myself.

Food for thought.  Check it out.
.