The Lackluster Jobs Report And GOP Sabotage

In the wake of a dismal jobs report, in which "employers created almost enough jobs to keep up with population growth in June, but not nearly enough to reduce the backlog of nearly 13 million unemployed workers," Republicans are doing two things:  Blaming Obama and trying to repeal health care.  As Steve Benen puts it:  "Eliminating health care benefits, as a practical matter, is the GOP jobs plan."

While the tepid job numbers are generally accepted as "absolute, concrete, incontrovertible proof that the president's jobs agenda isn't working," Benen points out, "we aren't trying Obama's jobs agenda."

Perhaps now would be a good time for a reality check. Last fall, Obama said the job market wasn't nearly strong enough, and he proposed an ambitious jobs plan called the American Jobs Act. Independent estimates showed that the policy, if implemented, would create as many as 1.9 million U.S. jobs in 2012 alone. Congressional Republicans, however, killed it.

ThinkProgress has a helpful list of the five key ways Republicans have sabotaged the economic recovery:

1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.