Budget Cuts Equal Job Cuts

As we see more and more information about the Republican plans for "austerity" and the budget cuts, we see more and more that all they are offering is the same one-trick pony that they have proposed to solve economic problems since the days of St Ronnie of Raygunz.

Now why would I put the term "austerity" in quotes? Because every time the Republicans make a proposal to cut spending, they also demand a tax cut. From Reuters:

(Reuters) - Republicans in the House of Representatives united on Friday behind a 2012 budget plan slashing trillions of dollars in government spending while cutting taxes -- two achievements conservatives say are necessary ingredients for a deal to raise the U.S. debt limit.

In fact, we have quite abundant objective, verifiable evidence from the last thirty years that cutting taxes does not increase revenues nor does cutting taxes cause businesses to create jobs. Yet for some strange reason, the people who continually propose cutting taxes because "it increases revenues and creates jobs" are considered "very serious people" by the Beltway Village Idiots Pundits. However, if tax cuts created jobs and increased government revenues, the past decade would have been a decade with some of the greatest job growth in the history of the US as well as shown a continued decrease to the national debt instead of the exact opposite.

What Do We Want? Jobs! When Do We Want Them? Now!

Today's Initial Unemployment Claims report for last week is out and the intial claims have jumped back up over 400k. Via Reuters:

A second report from the Labor Department showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 27,000 to a seasonally adjusted 412,000, well above economists' expectations for a fall to 380,000.

The four-week moving average of unemployment claims -- a better measure of underlying trends - climbed 5,500 to 395,750.

The first report the article covers is the Producer Price Index, defined here. Also from the linked Reuters article:

The Labor Department said on Thursday its seasonally adjusted index for prices paid at the farm and factory gate -- excluding volatile food and energy costs -- rose 0.3 percent after gaining 0.2 percent in February. Economists had expected core PPI to rise 0.2 percent in March.

David Dayen at FDL News this morning says this:

But the bad economy only makes this worse. There’s a ton of idle capacity in the economy, a demand shortfall that forces millions of potentially productive workers to the sidelines. USAT estimates 27 MILLION non-working adults; that’s inexcusable. And they will not be helped by contractionary fiscal policy that lowers demand even further.