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.

Fox News, the propaganda wing of the Republican party, has always protested loudly whenever someone calls it the propaganda wing of the Republican party. Fox’s supporters insist that there’s a difference between its prime time opinion shows and its news programs. But in fact, its news programs such as Fox and Friends are running four-minute long campaign ads like the one below:

Fox can’t possibly claim that this is some sort of mistake. The campaign ad even prominently includes the text “Fox and Friends Presents” in the opening minute. This attack ad was produced, paid for, and aired by one of Fox News’s supposedly unbiased “news” programs.

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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.

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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This jubilant post from ThinkProgress yesterday just made me sad:

BREAKING: SENATE DEMS WIN BIG JUDICIAL CONFIRMATION FIGHT | A senior Democratic senate source tells ThinkProgress that the Senate agreed to have a confirmation vote on the nomination of Paul Watford to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit at 5:30 today….

Breaking news: The Senate will do its jobs and vote on the President’s nominations, as required by the Constitution.

The fact that this is big news is a sign that the Senate is horribly broken. It’s time to end the filibuster.

Over the last two years, Republicans have voted for tax cut after tax cut for the rich, while insisting on sharp cuts to programs for the poor and middle class. Without a trace of self-consciousness, they have insisted that this is all in the name of fiscal responsibility, all the while ignoring that their giveaways to the rich far outweigh their petty and vindictive cuts for the rest of us. Surely, sooner or later someone had to call them out on this hypocrisy, right?

That’s why, as a preemptive measure, Speaker John Boehner has invented a brand-new metric by which Republicans will now measure the deficit. Boehner’s new metric is “spending-driven debt,” as reported by Ezra Klein:

I got a weird e-mail from John Boehner’s office yesterday. “No Reason to Wait,” it said. “Let’s Address Spending-Driven Debt Now.”

So what’s “spending-driven debt”? I’m not exactly sure. But there are a whole lot of references to it in my inbox. Later that same day, I got another e-mail from Boehner’s office about “the spending-driven debt that threatens job creation and economic growth.” And on May 4, I got an e-mail from Boehner’s office saying “those looking for work can’t find it because ObamaCare, our spending-driven debt, and the threat of tax hikes are making it harder for small businesses to hire.”

What is “spending-driven debt?” That’s easy. It’s a way for Republicans to measure success only by how much they can cut from programs that benefit the poor and middle-class, while absolving the super-rich of any responsibility to make sacrifices themselves.

The GOP will approve hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts for the super-rich without batting an eye, but they’ll fight tooth and nail to make sure programs like affordable student loans are “paid for.” They view programs for the 99 Percent as a zero-sum game, in which help for some must be offset by pain for others. When it comes to the 1 Percent, though, there are apparently unlimited funds.

This has been the standard Republican policy since George W. Bush took office. After more than 10 years, though, people are starting to ask why the 1 Percent never need to sacrifice. Boehner’s “spending-driven debt” is an effort to re-frame the debate to get us to stop asking that question.

Over the long-term, a large deficit is a problem. Right now, however, it is not a problem — in fact, more government spending will help the economy to improve. The right has been arguing for three years now that we need to prove to the markets that we’re serious about deficit reduction, or “bond vigilantes” will wreck our economy. So far, there has been absolutely zero evidence that they’re right.

Still, short-term economic stimulus and long-term fiscal responsibility aren’t at all incompatible. That’s the point Bill Clinton made in an interview on Tuesday:

Go ahead and plan for deficit reduction, Clinton said, but trigger it to actual improvements in the real economy.  You want your deficit to temporarily go up in recession to make up for the fact that consumers and businesses aren’t spending enough. Then you want it to come down when the economy is really picking up.  But pivot to deficit reduction too soon, and you’re asking for trouble.

That’s exactly the right approach. Convinced that we need to prove we’re serious about the deficit? Fine — let’s pass a budget that will automatically reduce the deficit once the economy comes back. 

Someone should really listen to Bill Clinton. I don’t think any of us would object to returning to an economy that works like it did throughout his presidency.

Who is Barack Obama? He’s a practicing Muslim who pals around with terrorists. He was born in Kenya and his birth certificate is an elaborate conspiracy. He’s a socialist who has presided over the largest expansion of government since the New Deal, with soaring taxes and exploding deficits to match.

These are all lies the Tea Party tells about Barack Obama. The trouble is, only the first two are treated as the lunatic conspiracy theories they are, even though the facts disprove all three. The fact is that spending, taxes, and the deficit are all lower today than when Obama took office.

I know the Tea Party Republicans hate Barack Obama, and nobody is going to change that. But it doesn’t matter if they feel like taxes and spending are going up; the fact is, they aren’t. That’s just one more way the Tea Party tries to rationalize their baseless hatred for our president.

What’s really sad is that our economy would be better off if Obama would actually do the things the Tea Party Republicans accuse him of. More government spending is just what we need right now. And since everyone seems convinced that Obama’s a big spender, it would be nice if he would actually push for higher spending. Right now, he has the dual disadvantage of being blamed for high spending, without the economic benefits of actually doing said spending.