Cutting Spending Cuts Jobs

I don't if I can say it any better than Joe Nocera did today, but it is getting extremely tiring to hear the far right in this country suggest cutting government spending will do anything but cost us jobs. I wonder sometimes if the current Tea Party crowd is simply anti-government or if they are opposed to any form of society whatsoever.

The fact we have even been talking about "debt ceiling" negotiations as opposed to budget talks shows how far off course the public conversation has gotten in the last few months. Cutting spending means taking money out of Americans pockets and putting more people on the unemployment lines. It is that simple. I understand how the very rich can have no problem with this. They have no shortage of money and do not fear a loss of work. But how regular middle- and low-class Americans can so thoroughly buy the line that any of the spending cuts in Washington will do anything short-term but hurt the economy shows a blindness to fact.

Of course, I don't comprehend how the Democrats can hold the White House and the Senate but continue to always get the short end of the stick on all of this. Personally, I suspect the Democratic establishment will benefit politically from how everything played out, and believe that became clear when Boehner's inability to control his own chamber was exposed.

But as Nocera notes in his NYT piece, that shouldn't matter. Growth is slowing, and it was already moving at a painfully inadequate rate. Now the party which is supposedly pro-business is doing what it can to ensure growth stops altogether. Meanwhile, unemployment remains high.

Everyone in Washington needs to understand that until the jobs problem is fixed, nothing will get better. If they don't see merit to that in and of itself, then they should consider voters can throw everybody out if we want come the next election. Does a struggling economy hurt the president? Sure. But even if the Republicans economic suicide leads to Obama's ouster, it could also lead to their own.

And if there is one thing the right should be able to comprehend, it is self-interest.