The GOP's path to victory.
Steven Benen's reaction to
today's jobs numbers is worth the read, emphasizing the point that "spending cuts are making unemployment worse."
In September, the U.S. economy added 103,000 jobs overall, but the private sector added 137,000 jobs. The total was dragged down by the loss of 34,000 jobs. There's no great mystery here—as government at every level cuts spending, this necessary leads to public-sector layoffs, affecting, among others, teachers, police officers, and firefighters.
For Republican policymakers, this is a feature, not a bug. In the GOP worldview, the economy will improve when hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers lose their jobs. That may sound ridiculous—and it is—but it's also a central tenet to the Republican employment policy. Remember what House Speaker John Boehner said earlier this year, told that his budget plan would force hundreds of thousands of government employees into unemployment? "So be it."[...]
What's necessary right now is some political will. President Obama’s American Jobs Act includes resources to keep public-sector workers on the job. Congressional Republicans have said this is out of the question because, well, I really don't know why. They haven't said. Something about "government = bad" or some similarly useless phrase that demonstrates a child-like understanding of public policy.
But the fact remains that it would be fairly easy to make the jobs landscape better. The expense wouldn't even be that great. The only thing standing in the way is a major political party that's convinced unemployment will get better after they fire a lot of teachers and cops.
It's actually not just a feature, it's a political strategy. Remember what Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said last year about the "single most important thing" for Republicans? That would be "for President Obama to be a one-term president."
Higher unemployment leads to more pain. More pain leads to more people wanting to change the status quo. With the field that the GOP has put forward for the presidential race, they're going to need the country to be in as much pain as possible to prevail. It's a pretty simple formula.
One that Democrats on the Super Congress and in the Senate, where they'll soon be considering a jobs bill, need to keep in mind.