Jobs Report Shows How Romneynomics Would Hurt the Economy

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168189/jobs-report-shows-how-romneynomics-would-hurt-recovery

Today’s jobs numbers don’t look good. The economy added only 69,000 jobs and the unemployment rate was upped to a painful 8.2 percent, little changed from previous months. And the news for government workers continues to be grim. Another 13,000 were thrown off the payrolls in May, adding up to a total 650,000 public sector jobs lost since the official end of the recession in June 2009.

This might be awkward news for Mitt Romney, who earlier this week called for even more pain for public workers. He told a group of supporters in Colorado on Tuesday that government employees should give up their jobs for those who work in the private sector. In talking about President Obama’s stimulus package, he said:

That stimulus he put in place, it didn't help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs, and the one place we should have cut back was on government jobs. We have a 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let's send them home and put you back to work!

Whether or not those are accurate numbers, Romney wants to amplify the misery of more than a half million unemployed public workers by putting another 145,000 out of work.

But if Romney wants to talk job creation and getting our economy out of this rut, he may have to take another look at this line of thinking. As Mike Konczal and I reported in March, Paul Krugman has estimated that unemployment would be closer to 7 percent if the government workforce had grown instead of cratering. While other economists might quibble over the exact impact these job losses have had on the economy, many agree that it’s a big part of what’s holding us back from a robust recovery.