Tag: Unemployment

Senate Democrats Defeat House Tea Party’s Job-Killing Budget Bill

Jon Ponder

The U.S. Senate saved between 700,000 and 1 million American jobs today by defeating the House tea party’s budget bill which contained $61 billion in budget cuts:

The cuts would have plunged the economy into the second Republican-driven recession in two and a half years.

The House-passed budget bill (HR. 1) was voted down 44-56. Lawmakers voting against the measure included two Independents and 51 Democrats, as well as [Tea Party Caucus members] Jim DeMint (SC), Mike Lee (UT) and Rand Paul (KY).

The three tea party senators presumably voted against the bill because they felt the $61 billion in cuts were not sufficient. Sen. Paul recently called for $500 billion in cuts, a move so drastic it’s unlikely the U.S. economy would recover from it for decades.

A study released at the end of February from Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics who also served as the chief economic adviser to the McCain-Palin presidential campaign in 2008, found that the tea party budget cuts would put around 700,000 people out of jobs.

Just days before Zandi’s report was released, a confidential Goldman Sachs analysis of the bill predicted it would slow growth by 2 percent, which would translate into the loss of at least 1 million jobs.

Analysis of the tea party’s budget bill by the Center for American Progress also found that the bill would lead to the loss of about 1 million jobs.

Based on these reports, it’s clear that had the tea party budget bill passed, the cuts would have plunged the economy into the second Republican-driven recession in two and a half years.

The Tea Party’s Job-Killing Budget Bill

Jon Ponder

The House tea party caucus put its dominance over Speaker John Boehner on display last week when it pushed him and his hapless leadership team to the edge of the political ledge on the issue of budget cuts.

Let them eat cakeHere’s the Economic Policy Institute’s analysis on Friday of the ramifications of the tea party cuts were they to be enacted:

After the House Appropriations Committee detailed $74 billion in cuts last Wednesday, a number of conservative members demanded $26 billion in additional cuts to make good on the “Pledge to America,” bringing the total level of cuts relative to President Obama’s FY 2011 budget request to $100 billion. A full $100 billion cut to discretionary spending would likely result in job losses on the order of 994,000, using OMB’s GDP projections (CBO’s projections are based on current law) and assuming a fiscal multiplier of 1.5.

The new GOP budget proposes cutting non-security discretionary spending by $81 billion relative to the president’s $478 billion request for 2011. Non-security discretionary cuts of this magnitude would likely result in job losses of just over 800,000. (2/15/2011)

But over the weekend, looking at the bill as passed, the Associated Press reported that it called for $60 billion in cuts, which, if so, would represent a significant defeat for the tea party caucus. Even at that level, the cuts will likely produce direct job losses of 650,000 in government layoffs, which would likely trigger to another 325,000 layoffs, mostly in the retail and service sectors — nearly 1 million jobs altogether — according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.

[…]

Boehner Caught Lying about the Number of Federal Jobs Created in the Past Two Years – So Be It

Jon Ponder
Boehner Caught Lying about Federal Jobs Created
Boehner Caught Lying about Federal Jobs Created

One of the Republicans’ most often-repeated “big lies” — the Goebbels-Rove tactic of repeating a falsehood over and over until it is perceived to be true or, as Rove put it, until a “new reality” has been created — is that the government cannot create jobs.

Boehner won control of the House last year by haranguing the president about “jobs, jobs, jobs,” now he says that if adding 200,000 federal employees to the unemployment rolls would please his tea partyist base, well, “so be it.”

This is, of course, demonstrably untrue. Just for starters, there are hundreds of thousands of contractors in aerospace, defense, transportation and elsewhere who owe their jobs to the federal government and no one else.

Notably, the federal government paid, and is still paying, the salaries of tens of thousands of employees of Halliburton and Blackwater in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the other end of the spectrum, the federal government contracts out nearly all the construction work on new roads, bridges, tunnels, harbors and the like. State and local governments do the same.

Beyond the contractors, the federal government also has direct employees — about 2.8 million of them. Federal employees use their salaries the same way everyone else does. They pay mortgages or rent and other bills. They buy groceries, clothing, appliances and electronics. They go out to restaurants and on vacation. They even pay taxes.

[…]

Unemployment Continues to Fall — Ahead of House Republican Majority

Trish

420,000

Number of new unemployment claims submitted last week, making it two weeks in a row that new claims dropped. The figure needs to get to about 400,000 to declare a recovery but at its height during the past year, 500,000 claims were the norm. The incoming Republicans in the House will no doubt claim credit for the recovery already in progress.

Why Are Republicans So Giddy about Tossing 2 Million Jobless Americans to the Wolves at Christmas?

Jon Ponder

Mike Barnicle’s debate with outgoing Arizona GOP-T Rep. John Shadegg on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” has gotten attention because of the outrageous new Grover Norquistian talking point about unemployment benefits that Shadegg trotted out:

It wasn’t Shadegg’s audacious lying that was remarkable — you can see that 24/7 on Fox — it was his swagger, the near-giddiness with which he consigned 2 million unemployed Americans to the wolves at the same time that he was demanding tax breaks for people so wealthy they don’t need to work.

BARNICLE: What about the fact that unemployment benefits pumped into the economy are an immediate benefit to the economy. Immediate.

SHADEGG: No, they’re not. Unemployed people hire people? Really? I didn’t know that.

BARNICLE: Unemployed people spend money, Congressman, because they have no money.

SHADEGG: Ah — ah — So your answer is it’s the spending of money that drives the economy. I don’t think that’s right. It’s the creation of jobs that drive the economy.

BARNICLE: But if you spend money in a variety store —

SHADEGG: Actually, the truth is the unemployed will spend as little of that money as they possibly can. Job creators create jobs.

A little later, Barnicle followed up on unemployment benefits:

BARNICLE: Let’s go back to what you said about unemployment checks. Unemployment checks, people don’t spend that money?

SHADEGG: No. They will spend as little as they can because they’ll hold on to it as long as they can. In reality, they don’t create jobs. You still haven’t told me how unemployed people create jobs.

[…]

After Bellowing ‘Where Are the Jobs?’ for Weeks, Now Boehner Can’t Say When He’ll Create Jobs, How Many

Jon Ponder

Swing voters in the South and the Heartland who gave Republicans their majority in the House on Tuesday have gotten a rude awakening in the 48 hours or so since results were announced.

These voters elected the Republican candidates in their districts based on the candidates’ promises to make fiscal responsibility and job creation their top priorities.

But the swing voters should have been listening more carefully to the men back in Washington who will be their local reps’ leaders.

For example, in the final days before the vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear in his campaign stump speeches that the Republicans’ real objective had nothing whatsoever to do with the economy:

[…]