Republican were unable to disguise their glee at yesterday’s poor job numbers. They’ve been working to undermine the economy for months, and they must see it as a great success that the recovery is now fizzling out.

I know, I know — both sides always want to blame the other for bad news. But the fact is, one side tried to do something to strengthen the recovery and the other didn’t. Remember when President Obama proposed the American Jobs Act? It would have created between 1 and 2 million jobs, reducing unemployment by as much as a full percentage point. Republicans in Congress killed it.

Why did they do it? Because they’re perfectly willing to sacrifice the economy and millions of Americans’ well-being to knock Barack Obama out of office. Their strategy is working, too. In all the commentary on the deflating recovery, virtually no news outlet saw fit to mention that Obama and the Democrats had pushed for the creation of 2 million more jobs. 

Obama proposed a whole series of ideas that independent economists said could create as many as two million jobs. Republicans filibustered virtually all of them, refusing to allow a majority vote on them in the Senate, even on ideas Republicans previously supported as legitimate job-creation measures, such as more investment in the nation’s infrastructure. Yet today’s news is being discussed almost entirely in terms of what it says about the President, as if Republicans have had no role whatsoever in the events of the past few years. [Greg Sargent, emphasis added]

It’s the successful culmination of years of economic sabotage by the GOP. They’re the big winners, but Barack Obama isn’t the biggest loser. The biggest losers are the millions of Americans who are unemployed or unable to make ends meet. Republicans have sacrificed millions of Americans’ well-being to achieve their goal of defeating President Obama.

Since the passage of the stimulus, way back at the beginning of Barack Obama’s term, our government has done just about nothing to promote job growth. In fact, it has actually done a good deal to hurt the economy by laying off thousands upon thousands of workers. We desperately need our government to stop being a part of the problem and start being a part of the solution.

Today’s jobs numbers — and more importantly, the trend over the past few months that shows the recovery petering out — prove that the economy still isn’t in a self-sustaining recovery. Without action, we could even fall into a double-dip recession. That’s why many prominent voices have been calling for a combination of upfront stimulus spending and planned deficit reduction. This would get our economy back on track, while calming unfounded fears about inflation and “bond vigilantes.” Paul Krugman explained the need for new public spending well:

When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.

Instead, Congress has done nothing, and in all likelihood will continue to do nothing. In fact, Republicans in Congress continue to demand more austerity, threatening another showdown over the debt ceiling. Here’s a news flash: austerity doesn’t work. Our policymakers’ obsession with austerity amounts to nothing less than economic sabotage.

In advance of today’s jobs report, economist Jared Bernstein has a reminder:

One could sagely stroke the chin and very correctly pronounce that given the statistical confidence intervals around these data—their margins of error—the monthly reports are given far too much weight.  The closely watched net job growth figure, for example, has a margin of error of plus or minus 100k.  The numbers also are subject to significant revisions in coming months.

…just think about this for a minute.  Given the margin of error, a 170k print on net job growth, for example, could actually be 70k jobs…or 270k!* If the unemployment rate ticks up to 8.2%, that’s statistically indistinguishable from no change at all.

The job numbers are important, of course. But given the high margin of error, there’s only so much weight we should be putting on individual monthly estimates; their main value is fodder for the talking heads on TV.

Far more important than each individual estimate is how the economy is trending — how are we doing compared to a year ago? Are job number generally on an upward trajectory? To make matters even more difficult, for the purposes of the election the important question is how Americans feel the economy is trending, even if the numbers don’t bear that out. If economic confidence is increasing, that will be good news for President Obama.

The point is, while today’s job numbers will provide another data point on how the economy is improving, it’s just one data point among many, and not a particularly accurate one at that.

UPDATE: Ouch. No, I didn’t write this in anticipation of a crummy jobs report. And the point is still valid, but there’s no denying that today’s jobs report stinks.

Mitt Romney is focusing all of his campaign’s energy on a single pitch: He claims that his experience as a vulture capitalist gives him the skills to turn our economy around. But his record in government so far proves that isn’t the case. After all, his vaunted experience as a hedge-fund manager didn’t do anything for the state of Massachusetts:

As the nation’s economy grew and the median income rose, under Romney, Massachusetts plummeted from 36th to 47th out of 50 states in job creation, and the median income declined.

In fact, some simple research shows that the economy in Massachusetts lagged behind the economy of the nation as a whole for every single month Romney was in office.  In the graph to the right, the blue line represents the US economy, and the red line represents Massachusetts. Both lines show the percentage change in jobs versus the previous year. Romney’s Massachusetts consistently underperformed the nation as a whole.

The fact is, Romney’s experience working for Bain Capital hasn’t proven a useful tool for creating a strong economy. That really should come as no surprise, since his private-sector experience was all about laying off middle-class workers to create paydays for billionaires. The Obama campaign put it well:

In the private sector, Romney focused on profits for his shareholders—not creating jobs. As governor, Romney cut jobs training and economic development programs—and as unemployment dropped across the U.S., Massachusetts lagged behind.

Mitt Romney is running on his record as a vulture capitalist at Bain Capital. At the same time, though, he’s screeching that it’s somehow out of bounds for Barack Obama to point out that his record consisted largely of reaping profits for super-rich investors by laying off workers. In a further contortion, while it’s apparently beyond the pale for Obama to discuss Romney’s record, the Romney campaign is advancing a demonstrable lie about Obama’s record:

Mitt Romney’s campaign events and the firepower of American Crossroads will both focus this week on President Barack Obama’s jobs record as a way to fight off charges about the Republican candidate’s private-sector experience, with a Romney aide attacking the stimulus as “the mother of all earmarks.”…

A senior campaign aide said Romney will argue that Obama has actually subtracted jobs…

But he hasn’t. That’s just another one of the countless lies Romney has built his campaign around. The facts are the facts. Obama reversed the plummeting economy that he inherited, and there are now more jobs than at the beginning of his presidency. 

One would think the facts would count for something, but they don’t. Our lapdog media has dutifully reported Romney’s latest lie, just as they have dutifully reported all of his lies with virtually no scrutiny, and just as they dutifully reported his outrageous assertion that his business record should somehow be off limits for Obama.

So here’s the truth you won’t read in the legacy media. The numbers clearly show that we have had significant job growth under Barack Obama. Mitt Romney doesn’t know how to create jobs, he only knows how to create profits for the super-rich. His proposals for the economy would give billions to the rich while slashing government programs that benefit the rest of us. That’s exactly what leveled our economy in the first place.

I wrote last week that recent job gains in the auto industry are one of the best arguments in favor of government intervention in the economy. The rescue of American automakers — and their subsequent success — clearly shows that the government has an important role to play in helping the economy recover, and that failure to act would be devastating.

As it turns out, the auto industry is playing an even larger role in the recovery than we might have thought:

Vehicle purchases by consumers alone accounted for 30% of all the GDP growth in the last two quarters. [Credit Suisse report, Financial Times via Wonk Wire]

Just think: All of those jobs could be going to Japanese and European workers if we had allowed the American auto industry to fail.

There are those out there who say the government can’t do anything to help the economy. They say the government just makes things worse, and it should back off and let private markets sort themselves out. These people — people like Mitt Romney — argued that we should let the automakers go bankrupt, despite the more than one million jobs that would have been lost. Today, our thriving auto industry is the best proof of the effectiveness of government intervention:

The automobile industry has been a consistent bright spot in the American economy over the last several months, as automakers have added jobs to meet growing demand. And news from the industry is only getting better, as new estimates expect automakers to sell 14.3 million cars in the United States in 2012 — 1.5 million more than they sold last year.

Factories for both foreign and domestic automakers are now working “at maximum capacity” and the industry is adding shifts and jobs to keep up with that rising demand, the USA Today reports…

If folks like Romney had had their way, not only would the auto industry not be adding jobs, we’d be over one million jobs in the hole.

Everybody knows that Barack Obama is the spendingest President in history. Everybody knows that the Federal government under his watch has grown to a colossal, nearly incomprehensible size, crushing us with a mountain of debt. That’s simply common knowledge.

The problem is, the “common knowledge” is dead wrong:

Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.

Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.

What makes this so painful is that Obama is going to suffer doubly when it comes to the politics of spending and the economy. Since everybody “knows” that Obama is a profligate spender, voters will punish him for that, even though it’s not true. At the same time, since he hasn’t spent enough to stimulate the economy, voters will punish him for that, too.

If only Obama and the Democrats had spent more when they had the chance. Since they’re going to be cast as spendthrifts anyway, it sure would be nice to have the economic growth that spending would have stimulated.

The big concern among wonks in Washington these days is that Congress is going to drive us off the “fiscal cliff” — they’ll fail to extend current policies, trigger a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts, and wreck the economic recovery: 

What impact might that have on the economy?  Their best guess is that it means declining real GDP in the first half of next year to the tune of 1.3% (annualized; or around $100 billion through the first half), followed by growth of 2.3% in the second half of 2013, or 0.5% for the full year.  Unemployment would reverse course and start rising it that fiscal scenario remained in place…

This sort of policy is absolute insanity, and some of the best proof yet that Congress is broken. Think about it this for a moment — as current policy stands, we will knowingly dip back into a recession in a matter of months. Everyone knows it, and it’s perfectly possible that nothing will be done about it. What I want to know is, given that everyone in Congress knows that Congress is dysfunctional, why in the world would we pass a set of policies that will just dump us right back into a recession?

The technical reason we’re scheduled for a double-dip recession is that a huge chunk of current policy is scheduled to expire at the end of the year. These are policies that keep being extended temporarily, without any change to the permanent laws on the books, which are constantly threatening to kick back in. We essentially have two sets of government policies — the permanent ones, which we don’t want, and the temporary ones, which Congress refuses to make permanent. What kind of a way is that to run a government?

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