July 09, 2011 04:39 PM UTC

Government Is "Killing The Economy," Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Edition

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• by: Colorado Pols

CNN’s Alan Silverleib:

Top congressional Republicans on Friday used a new dismal jobs report to blast Democrats’ push for more tax revenue in the ongoing debt ceiling negotiations, arguing that such a move would derail an already shaky economic recovery.

Federal officials reported Friday that the economy added only 18,000 jobs in June — far below the number predicted by most economists. Unemployment inched up another tenth of a point to 9.2%.

“Today’s report is more evidence that the misguided ‘stimulus’ spending binge, excessive regulations, and an overwhelming national debt continue to hold back private-sector job creation in our country,” said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. “A debt limit increase that raises taxes or fails to make serious spending cuts won’t pass the House.”

Except, according to U.S. News and World Report, that’s pretty far from the whole story.

This is what austerity feels like. In another setback for the economy, the unemployment rate in June rose to 9.2 percent, its highest level since December 2010, the Labor Department reported. A measly 18,000 jobs were added in June, carried by an increase of 57,000 jobs in the private sector but dulled by losses of 39,000 jobs in the public sector. [Pols emphasis] As government stimulus winds down and states move to close massive budget gaps, public sector cuts should continue to grow, labor market experts say…

While the overall picture painted in the report is gloomy, the bigger story may lie in cuts on the government front. In June, local governments reported job losses of 18,000, and the federal government shed 14,000 jobs. Nearly 100,000 local government employees have lost their jobs so far this year, and 464,000 have found themselves jobless since local government employment peaked in September 2008. Meanwhile, private sector employers, who cut jobs at a more rapid pace earlier in the recovery, have slowly added jobs. Since March 2010, when private sector employment rose for the first time in more than two years, private employers have added about two million employees to their payrolls.

Wait a minute, you mean public sector jobs count? All those cops and firefighters and teachers and civil servants, so many getting laid off around the nation, including in Colorado…wait, those are jobs too, aren’t they? And when public sector jobs are slashed, as it turns out the economy suffers just like it does when private sector jobs are? Because at a certain level, jobs are jobs?

It’s a big problem for the GOP to fully explain this, as it makes further demands for “hiring freezes,” and the ideological budget cuts putting public employees out of work across the nation–recession simply giving cover for what they have always wanted to do–much harder to justify. This is one reason why you see so much trashing of public employees from the right as “scum on government payrolls”–Republicans would rather you not empathize with those firemen, cops, teachers, and civil servants. Because if you do, you might get upset about them losing their jobs.

It’s pretty remarkable hubris that John Boehner places the blame on public sector “spending binges” for a dismal jobs report, when that report actually shows the slashing of public sector jobs, such a major plank in the GOP’s agenda, is the reason those numbers look so bad.

But keep this in mind next time Frank McNulty tries to pull the same trick.