The only failure in Republican attempts to totally destroy the economy was their inability to obstruct the President’s stimulus the Congressional Budget Office and several independent agencies claim created over 3 million jobs. However, they have made up for that success by refusing to consider President Obama’s American Jobs Act proposed over a year-and-a-half ago, and coupled with severe austerity measures at the state and local level, they have been successful maintaining unemployment at over 8% instead of less-than 6% if they were not intent on obstruction and economic devastation.




[font color="red"]There is no doubt the Republicans know what works to improve hiring and economic growth because every Republican administration has invested in hiring more public employees during a recession, and they always depended on federal funding to increase the workforce at the federal and state level, and not giving more tax breaks to their imaginary “job creators” they claim leads to full employment[/font]. The GOP austerity measures were not limited to blocking federal money to help states hire and retain employees, because states with Republican governors and legislatures made drastic cuts in the public sector workforce and many turned down federal aid to demonstrate their contempt for their residents, and the federal government. In California, for example, a Republican in Congress, Jeff Denham, is attempting to block implementation of a much needed high-speed rail project that will create over a million jobs as the largest earth-moving project in the state’s history, and sustain hundreds-of-thousands more jobs for maintenance and operation in cities up and down the state. His argument is that the government cannot afford the cost and the money is better spent creating jobs…with more tax cuts for “job creators.”


The austerity measures Republicans are implementing have never worked during a recession and despite the abject failure of every European country that enacted austerity, they are hell-bent on following the countries that have no growth and soaring unemployment. Even the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, Willard Romney, admitted that austerity during a recession is disastrous, and yet Republicans have killed over 600,000 public sector jobs that prevented 2.3 million downstream jobs from being created. Coupled with Republican obstruction of the President’s job plan in January 2011, they have effectively prevented 4.2 million Americans from finding good, living wage jobs, or enough to bring the unemployment rate down to 5.5% in a little over a year. Instead of cutting 600,000 teaching, police, firefighter and other public jobs, if states had increased those lost jobs by one-half, the unemployment rate would be under 5% and tax revenue would be up, the deficit would be reduced, and the economy would be humming along.

Republicans are now claiming that letting the Bush era tax cuts for the rich expire will kill more jobs, but the facts, and history, do not bear out their fallacious assertions. During the Clinton Administration, the wealthy paid 3% more in taxes and the economy added 22-million jobs, wages increased, and businesses boomed. In fact, during the Eisenhower Administration, the wealthy paid nearly 90% in taxes during the time when hundreds of thousands of soldiers returned from World War II, and the infusion of cash created the nation’s highway system, a booming economy, and the great middle class. The GOP knows how to create jobs, but they have no interest in America’s economy, or its people and they must relish the thought of killing jobs and retarding economic growth as they planned in 2009, and will continue throughout 2012.
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During eight years of the Bush administration, Republicans managed to squander a substantial budget surplus, wage two unnecessary and unfunded wars at a cost of $6 trillion over the next generation, and drove the country into a Great Recession. Along the way they destroyed Americans retirement savings, the housing industry, and successfully killed tens of millions of Americans’ jobs. For two short years after the Republican economic catastrophe ended, President Obama saved the economy, staunched job losses with a meager stimulus, and created millions of jobs and yet, by 2011 Republicans went against conventional economic wisdom and embarked on a job-killing austerity spree under the guise of reducing long term deficit they blew up during the Bush years. For the past three years, besides attacking women’s rights, Republicans have made killing jobs their raison d’être and according to a new report, their economic insanity will cost the nation immense long term economic damage.

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Likely, the unemployment rate increase is a result of the Republicans’ precious sequestration cuts that were predicted to kill about a million jobs over the next fiscal year, and Americans should brace themselves for more job losses due to, at the very least, the food stamp cuts that began on November first. There will certainly be more jobs lost due to House Republicans’ intention to cut food stamp spending by ten-fold, or more, according to Paul Ryan and Republican budget negotiations founded on austerity madness.

When Republicans swept into the House in 2011, they promised their highest priority was job creation, but they started the 112th session with budget cuts that killed over a million jobs causing Speaker John Boehner to say “so be it.” Boehner’s cavalier attitude about killing jobs was a portent of the next three years of Republican austerity insanity, and according to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, “the evidence is overwhelming that by failing to respond effectively to mass unemployment, by not even making unemployment a major policy priority, austerity has done immense long-term damage to America’s economy” that Republicans claim is doomed unless they enact more job killing austerity over the next decade.

The consensus at the International Monetary Fund research conference was that by not focusing on unemployment, the Republicans’ austerity has already reduced America’s economic potential by around 7% which means America is poorer by more than $1 trillion a year. Unfortunately for the American people and the nation’s economy, the damage is not just for one year, it is long-term damage of $1 trillion a year for multiple years. Republicans have screamed that the long-term deficit poses an existential threat to America as a reason to slash domestic spending, and it is the primary reason absolutely nothing has been done about the unemployment epidemic killing the economy and Americans’ financial security.
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One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

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