One, that every party will make unemployment the major issue. Two, that no party will make any serious proposal to reduce it.

On balance, that's a good thing. By now, most politicians know there is nothing they can do about unemployment in the short term, and that they are likely to do more harm than good by trying. We have thirty years of inflation and an $800-billion national debt to thank for that insight. Still, they feel obliged to say something. So we will be presented with a shelf full of gimmicks and wheezes advertised as cures for unemployment, none of which will make the slightest difference in the number of jobless.

Most of these are pet schemes their proponents would like to do anyway, but which they could not otherwise pretend were in the public interest. The Liberals, for example, would like to spend a lot of money on public works projects, ideally in swing ridings. Presto: it's a jobs program. Yet the government's own internal study has confirmed what economic theory would suggest: that for all the billions of dollars diverted into the infrastructure program, it created no more jobs than would have been created under "the debt-reduction alternative," which is to say the same number as if the money had never been spent.

Reformers and Conservatives would dearly love to cut taxes, so they, too, subtly link this to jobs, as in "tax-cuts-for-jobs." Yet there is precious little evidence to connect the two, and little more in the way of theoretical support. The closest the two parties brush with the truth is in the matter of payroll taxes, which are at least notionally related to the cost of hiring. But while rising payroll taxes may have some effect on employers' willingness to take on new employees, the evidence is that in the end workers absorb most of the taxes in the form of lower wages. Whether or not it makes sense to cut taxes, now or later, it has nothing to do with unemployment.

Once upon a time, either of these approaches -- spending more, or taxing less -- might have been defended on the grounds that they would increase the demand for goods and services, and so encourage the economy to soak up any excess labour.

Whether or not this sort of economic pump-priming ever worked as its supporters claimed, the hard fact is that every party, of whatever stripe, promises to reduce the deficit, not increase it. It is the difference between taxes and spending that marks government's contribution to aggregate demand, not the overall level of either. You cannot pretend to be priming the pump if at the same time you are siphoning water out.

So we are caught in an ideological backwash. No party, whatever half- hearted charade it may put on, has any idea how to promote economic growth, at least of the short-term, job-creating variety. Yet every party still subscribes to the belief that faster growth is the only remedy for unemployment. Not knowing what to do in the short term, they have taken this as an excuse to do nothing in the long term: nothing, that is, but wait for growth. This results in some oddly muted claims. The Conservatives, for example, boast that their platform will "create" one million new jobs over four years. But that is just about the same number as would be created anyway, under the most modest growth forecasts.

Whether this will be enough to reduce unemployment in the short term, given the probable rush of job-seekers lured back into the labour force by better economic conditions, is a matter of some dispute. But the most that can be hoped for from this approach is, some years hence, to reduce unemployment to its "natural rate," somewhere between 7 and 8 per cent: past that point, growth cannot take us. That's a long wait for such little relief.

We will not begin to address this issue in a serious way until we stop treating unemployment as a mere residual of economic growth, and start to look at it for what it is: a problem of malfunctioning labour markets. In particular, we will have to allow the unemployed to "price themselves into work," by reducing the cost to employers of new hires. But we cannot do that until we persuade those who already have jobs to give up some of the benefits and privileges they now enjoy, to the extent that these extra costs pose a barrier to increased employment.

Oh hang it: that was supposed to be the topic of this column. We'll have to take one more kick at this.