House GOP’s “Job Creating” Spending Cuts Destroyed 370,000 Jobs

House Re­pub­li­cans took the gov­ern­ment to the brink of shut­down last spring by de­mand­ing across-the-board bud­get cuts to many vital pro­grams. In­stead of fo­cus­ing on job cre­ation, as Amer­i­cans wanted them to, the GOP turned its at­ten­tion to slash­ing funds for pro­grams that funded as­sis­tance for women and chil­dren, local law en­force­ment, the so­cial safety net, en­vi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tions, and many other pro­grams they deemed as ei­ther too ex­pen­sive or un­nec­es­sary.

Worse, when chal­lenged on why they hadn’t made the ef­fort to tackle high un­em­ploy­ment, Re­pub­li­cans in­sisted that their slash-and-burn bud­get cuts were meant to cre­ate jobs.

Not all of those cuts made it through, but the GOP suc­ceeded in pass­ing mas­sive spend­ing re­duc­tions as part of a con­tin­u­ing res­o­lu­tion that kept the gov­ern­ment op­er­at­ing. Ac­cord­ing to a new re­port from the Cen­ter for Amer­i­can Progress’ Scott Lilly, those cuts didn’t re­sult in the job cre­at­ing boon Re­pub­li­cans in­sisted would fol­low. In­stead, it has done just the op­po­site, as those cuts will re­sult in the de­struc­tion of roughly 370,000 jobs.

(Source: nationofchange.org)