so be it
Yeah. Turns out Boner's 200k number is a lie. Go figure...
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/feb/15/john-boehner/john-boehner-says-200000-new-federal-jobs-have-spr/We turned, as we always do, to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the official statistician for the United States labor force.
BLS calculates two categories that illuminate Boehner’s comment.
The first is the overall rise in federal employees between January 2009 and January 2011. The net increase was 58,000.
The second is the number of federal employees without counting U.S. Postal Service workers. Over that same two-year period, the increase was 140,800.
Both of those numbers are lower than the 200,000 figure Boehner cited.
We also checked with John M. Palguta, vice president for policy with the Partnership for Public Service, a non-profit that promotes government service, and he confirmed our general conclusion using numbers from a different database.
He dug into the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s on-line federal workforce data source, "FedScope." He found that in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, respectively, the federal government filled a net 59,995 and 47,062 new permanent, full-time, non-seasonal, non-postal jobs. Combined, that means that federal employment rose by 107,057 jobs -- well short of 200,000.
We checked with Boehner’s office to see what his statement was based on. Aides said they had used figures from December 2008 to January 2011, which produced an increase of 153,000 federal, non-postal jobs. Then they factored in, on a discounted basis, the temporary jobs required to carry out the 2010 Census. According to the Census Bureau, such temporary employment peaked at 585,729 in early May 2010.
"We think 200,000 is probably generous to the White House," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.
In previous fact checks, we have rejected the idea of adding temporary Census workers to federal job totals. While the statements we rated previously aren’t structured in exactly the same way as Boehner’s, we think the general principle remains valid -- that when you’re counting the rise or fall in the number of federal workers over a long period of time, it’s cherry picking to count the creation of temporary jobs but not their elimination.
All told, we find that Boehner’s 200,000 number is way off. We rate it False.
But how many job will be lost if Boner get's his way?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/15/AR2011021506021.html"So be it."
That was House Speaker John Boehner's cold answer when asked Tuesday about job losses that would come from his new Republican majority's plans to cut tens of billions of dollars in government spending this year.
"Do you have any sort of estimate on how many jobs will be lost through this?" Pacifica Radio's Leigh Ann Caldwell inquired at a news conference just before the House began its debate on the cuts.
Boehner stood firm in his polished tassel loafers. "Since President Obama has taken office the federal government has added 200,000 new federal jobs, and if some of those jobs are lost in this, so be it," he said.
"Do you have any estimate of how many will?" Caldwell pressed. "And won't that negatively impact the economy?"
"I do not," Boehner replied, moving to the next questioner.
Well, Mr. Speaker, I do. I checked with budget expert Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, and, using the usual multipliers, he calculated that the cuts - a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal 2011 - would lead to the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things. That's nearly 1 million jobs - possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession...
But in the short run, the cuts Boehner and his caucus propose would cause a shock to the economy that would slow, if not reverse, the recovery. And however pure Boehner's motives may be, the dirty truth is that a stall in the recovery would bring political benefits to the Republicans in the 2012 elections. It is in their political interests for unemployment to remain higher for the next two years. "So be it" is callous but rational.
Boehner could dismiss the forecasts of job losses as the work of liberal administration critics. But Boehner himself is well aware that the cuts will lead to more unemployment; that's why he's fighting hard to shield his Ohio constituents.
(Emphasis mine) "shield his Ohio constituents"? An earmark by any other name...
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Blogs/Capital-Exchange/2011/02/14/Capital-Exchange-Ohio-Could-Benefit-from-Earmark-Amid-Deep-Spending-Cuts.aspxI was taken aback on Saturday when I learned that a package of deep cuts by House Republicans in hundreds of critically important federal programs included a $450 million increase for a Defense Department project that is opposed by the Pentagon. As a column I published yesterday demonstrates, the project would have an extraordinarily large impact on the economy of two neighboring cities in Ohio; Cincinnati and Dayton. It so happens the new Republican Speaker of the House, Rep. John Boehner was born and grew up in Cincinnati and now represents a Western Ohio Congressional District in which Dayton is the largest City.
The project involves the Pentagon’s procurement of jet engines for various versions of the new F-35 fighter. The problem that General Electric Aviation, the company that wants to sell the engine, and the political and business leaders in Ohio who want the jobs created by the engine sales face, is that they don’t have an engine. As a result they want the federal government to pay them to develop an engine. Meanwhile buried in the details of the explanatory sheets accompanying this legislation is a $225 million earmark in the Navy budget and another $225 million earmark in the Air Force budget that would make those two services write the checks.
One reason the Pentagon is upset by this is that they already have a perfectly good engine and they believe the cost of helping GE and its partner, British owned Rolls Royce Group, come up with an alternative would eventually be more than $2 billion—money they argue they would never get back as the result of having two producers rather than one.
How does this square with the speaker’s repeated proclamations that we must cut spending and we must eliminate earmarks? The $450 billion this provision would send to facilities in Dayton and elsewhere would do a lot to the harshness of the cuts proposed in other parts of this same legislation—cuts like the support of local law enforcement or reductions in food safety inspections that affect every single community in America.
But more troubling still is the apparent duplicity on earmarks. I will concede that no one has a precise definition of the term. So, the old adage, “if it walks like a duck,” applies. In my mind an earmark is a decision to spend money for a particular purpose when the motivation is based more on local parochial concerns than on the needs of the country as a whole. Looks like a duck to me.
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