Along with squandering a federal budget surplus, getting us mired in two “wars” and devastating the net worth of most Americans, today’s revised jobs data show a net loss of 646,000 private sector jobs during the eight Bush/Cheney Republican presidential years—and only 1,466,000 private sector net jobs were created during G.H.W. Bush’s four years.

That is, a net of only 820,000 private sector jobs were created over the 12 most recent years of Republican Presidents.

In the first month of Obama’s Presidency another 725,000 private sector jobs were lost. A total of 3,348,000 private sector jobs were lost in Obama’s first six months of trying to get a handle on the economic disaster the Republicans created.

Nonetheless, even including the jobs lost in Obama’s first six months, today’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the last 23 consecutive months of private sector job creation restored all but 549,000 of the private sector jobs that existed when Obama was sworn into office.

Obama’s first three-year job record is already better—less awful—than the eight-year Republican record of President George W. Bush.

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Originally posted at Capital Gains and Games.

This should eliminate all doubts about how little some members of Congress understand about federal finances.

As Dana Milbank explains in his column from today's The Washington Post, eight House Republican freshman made a grandstanding play this week to get public attention and credit for something that makes no financial sense whatsoever.

First, the eight representatives didn't spend all of the amount they got in 2011 from the House of Representatives to pay for staff and other expenses in their Washington and district offices. They correctly claimed that they saved taxpayers money by doing so.

But second, the representatives then said that they wanted to return the unspent money to the Treasury and designate that the funds be used to reduce the national deb. They clearly felt that they should get big props for doing this.

This is wrong on so many levels that it's hard to know where to start.

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The news is just out, the economy added a healthy number of new jobs last month, even with government jobs still declining thanks to austeridiocy. The better news is that there is an accelerating trend. The bad news, no help for the long-term unemployed and the charts are still scary.

True Story

This is a true story: I am on a bus from DC to NY. It's a great bus, nice seats, wifi... On the bus I'm checking and the jobs report comes out: U.S. adds 243K jobs in January; unemployment rate drops to 8.3%.

"You got to let me off the bus! I got a job!"

So passing through Baltimore this guy on the bus gets a phone call, goes up to the driver, saying, "You got to let me off the bus, I got a call, I got a job. You got to let me off the bus!"

So I guess maybe there's really something going on with jobs!

The Numbers

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President Obama today will go to a fire house in the Virginia suburbs of Washington to tout his plan to promote hiring of veterans as first responders. It's a program that is sorely needed to address an American travesty: One out of every eight of the veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are out of a job.

But as today's unemployment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows, the economy could still use a job corps for the rest of us as well.

The news is good: 243,000 jobs were produced in January, and the unemployment rate went down to 8.3 percent. That includes 257,000 in private sector jobs, offset by a loss of 11,000 local government jobs and 6,000 federal government jobs. With that report, the economy has seen under President Obama's watch 10 quarters of economic growth and five quarters of jobs growth. The report shows growth across the private economy, notably in manufacturing and construction.

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• MORNING MESSAGE: Don't Break Out The Bubbly
• Unemployment Rate Ticks Down
• Romney Economic Message Tied Up In Knots
• President Roots Fight Against Inequality In His Faith
• SEC Goes Easy On Banks
• Corporations Warm To Super PACs
• Breakfast Sides

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Although it's a bit early to know for sure, let's hope that 2012 is the year that the economic policies known as "austerity" finally crashed and burned. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman is certainly ready to bid adieu to austerity, writing in The New York Times this week that deep spending cuts leveled by state and local governments have proven to be "a major drag on the overall economy" and most probably have erected an "unnecessary" detour in "the road to self-sustaining growth."

Nowhere have the ravages of austerity policies been more apparent and more ruinous than in public education, where deep budget cuts to schools have taken spending back to 2008 levels or earlier. What we've witnessed over the past two years is the biggest cut to education since the Great Depression, and it has had catastrophic and long-lasting effects on a generation of kids -- beginning with the very youngest.

Austerity Is Eviscerating Early Childhood Education

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On Wednesday the House voted to extend a two-year federal worker pay freeze an additional year. These workers, instead of getting a raise at the end of 2012, will have to wait until the end of 2013. (The House vote and our analysis is posted on our sister site, TheMiddleClass.org.)

The right-wing blogosphere is positively giddy about this, especially in the wake of a Congressional Budget Office study Monday that said that, yes, as a whole federal employees do get somewhat better pay and benefits than many of their private sector counterparts. "Federal Workers Overpaid, and CBO Agrees," reads the Heritage Foundation's blog, The Foundry. "Federal Workers Earning More Than Those Paying Their Salaries," harrumphs Red State.

The right wants the rest of us to join the gripe session: "Look at all of those overpaid federal bureaucrats," they say.

Well, let's look at all of those federal workers—and what's been happening to the rest of the workforce.

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MItt Romney is taking a lot of heat for saying that he's "not concerned about the very poor." To be fair, he also said he's not concerned about the very rich either. Lucky for him the feeling isn't mutual that that side of the economic divide. According to recent FEC filings, the very rich are very concerned with Mitt Romney's campaign for his party's presidential nomination. And why shouldn't they be concerned? After all, some of them are Mitt's friends and former colleagues.

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 Last week Republican Mitch Daniels once again pushed the "means testing" argument against Social Security, saying that we can no longer "afford to send millionaires pension checks" or  "pay medical bills for even the wealthiest among us."  

Daniels even appropriated the rhetoric of the 99 percent, arguing that we must "stop sending the wealthy benefits they do not need, and stop providing them so many tax preferences that distort our economy and do little or nothing to foster growth."

I kept waiting for Grover Norquist or Karl Rove to yell "mic check!"  But behind Daniels' 99-percent rhetoric lies a means-testing scam designed to protect millionaires, not restore justice.

Means-Testing Sounds Reasonable

Daniels and his fellow Social Security attackers are able to draw on a very reasonable-sounding (but completely deceptive) argument, one that's been honed and promoted by billionaire-funded think tanks and other anti-government organizations.  The "means testing" argument does sound fair - until you think about it.  

After all, what could be more reasonable than saying we can't afford to send "pension checks" to millionaire retirees who don't need them?

There is something that's much more reasonable - and much easier to implement, too:  Just tax them what they should have been paying in the first place.

So You Want to Be a Millionaire?

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This week three new reports described even more continuing damage to our economy caused by China's trade cheating -- and our own lack of response. Even as the auto industry recovers and auto-assembly jobs are returning, the auto-parts industry and jobs are not.

The reports, one from the Stewart and Stewart law firm along with two reports from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) make the case that China is cheating, that it is costing lots of US jobs, and detail the national numbers and individual state costs.

The reports describe Chinese trade violations and calculate the damage done to our economy:

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The following statement is in response to the newly introduced Republican bill that would block the automatic military spending cuts that are now part of the 2010 deal to increase the debt limit.

Republicans believe bloated Pentagon budgets strengthen American security. In fact, the reverse is true. The most important security priority for America is making the investments here at home vital to reviving our economy, modernizing our infrastructure, educating our children, and getting our fiscal house in order. To achieve this, we need to reduce unnecessary spending – and there is no greater source of that than the Pentagon.

The Cold War is over. Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda dispersed. The U.S. cannot and should not police the world. The Pentagon now spends almost as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. It is the largest source of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government. The Pentagon budget more than doubled over the past decade, bringing total U.S. defense spending to historically high levels not seen since World War II. It’s higher in comparable dollars than it was under Ronald Reagan in the midst of the Cold War.

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Not long ago, in A Win For Labor - FAA Bill Drops Anti-Union Language, I wrote that, "negotiators have dropped the anti-union language for votes to start a union. Republicans were insisting that no-shows be counted as "No" votes. Delta's check must have been mailed late."

Well, not so fast. While dropping a blatant anti-labor requirement that any non-voters be counted as 'no' voters, it turns out that the bill remains solidly and sneakily anti-labor. This is supposed to be a bill about airline safety and security, but the fight is over anti-labor provisions... what's up with that? Laura Clawson at Daily Kos writes in, Unions call on Democrats to reject poison pills buried in Republican 'compromise' on FAA,

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• MORNING MESSAGE: The Republican Myth Of Obama’s Entitlement Society
• Romney Doubles Down On Dismissing Poverty
• Obama Proposes, Boehner Rejects Refi Plan
• GOP Tries To Extend Fed Worker Pay Freeze
• Breakfast Sides

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The following was originally published at RobertReich.org

One of the few things Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich agree on is that President Obama is turning America into “European-style welfare culture.”

In his standard stump speech Romney charges Obama with creating a nation of dependents. “Over the past three years Barack Obama has been replacing our merit-based society with an entitlement society.”

Gingrich calls Obama “the best food-stamp president in American history.”

What’s their evidence? Both rely on federal budget data showing direct payments to individuals shot up by almost $600 billion, a 32 percent increase, since the start of 2009.

They also point to Census data showing that 49 percent of Americans now live in homes where at least one person is collecting a federal benefit – Social Security, food stamps, unemployment insurance, worker’s compensation, or subsidized housing. That’s up from 44 percent in 2008.

Finally, they trumpet Social Security Administration figures showing that the number of people on Social Security disability jumped 10 percent in Obama’s first two years in office.

They argue our economic problems stem from this sharp rise in “dependency.” Get rid of these benefits and people will work harder.

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Today, the nation is abuzz over Mitt Romney bluntly cold comment: "I'm not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there."

This is not a slip of the tongue. This is what he believes. We know, because he said it before.

In October, I reported here that Romney made this exact same argument while stumping in Iowa: "In our country, the people who need the help most are not the poor, who have a safety net, not the rich, who are doing just fine, but the middle class."

Why would Romney repeatedly make this claim? Here's my analysis from October:

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