GOP austerity brings economy to a virtual halt
Just an awful jobs report, the worst in quite a while. You can pretty much blame the sequester for this one, which means you can pretty much blame John “I got 98% of what I wanted [from it]” Boehner and the GOP:
Austerity may be starting to squeeze the life out of the job market.
U.S. employers hired at the slowest pace in nearly a year in March, adding only 88,000 jobs to non-farm payrolls, with steep job cuts in the retail and government sectors, including 12,000 at the U.S. Postal Service, according to a Labor Department report released Friday.
Economists predicted March’s net gain to be somewhere closer to 190,000, according to a Bloomberg survey.
“This is a punch to the gut,” Austan Goolsbee, former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, said on CNBC. “This is not a good number.”
This is the success of the core Republican Party platform for the last 20 years: savage spending cuts regardless of the consequences to the economy. The GOP promised cuts even larger than their sequester in the 2010 Pledge to America and there’s a lot more of that in Paul Ryan’s most recent discredited budget proposal.
Harsh austerity is what the GOP advocated in 2009 when Democrats went for economy-recovering stimulus instead. Now the GOP finally got to try it their way, and harsh austerity is choking the life out of the economy.
As if this even needs to be said at this point, Krugman has been proven right yet again. Conservatives say that stimulus via deficits is bad always (because deficits are always bad) and they were wrong in 2009. Conservatives say that austerity is good and will grow the economy, and it just shrunk it. How many times do we have to do this before we all stop listening to conservatives when it comes to economics, a subject they clearly don’t understand?
Enough already. Conservatives may very well have a few good ideas here and there as far as politics goes generally, but they don’t get economics. They can’t get it, not unless they leave faith-based politics behind where want and wish proceed data and theory.
Leave economics to the professionals; leave it to liberals and academics. Leave it to people who want to hear the story from the data, not find data to fit the story.