Boehner Says: Strengthen the Recovery by Boosting Unemployment!
That does appear to be the plan.
Mark Thoma:
Economist's View: The Fear Fairy: Some people think the solution to unemployment is more unemployment.... [I]t's not the confidence fairy, but rather the fear fairy that is supposed to stimulate the economy? Yeah, that'll work because -- you know -- there's not enough people looking for jobs now. Yet another economic rationale invented by Republicans to support ideological preferences.
Ezra Klein:
Prosperity through lower wages?: Tim Fernholz and Jim Tankersley took the time to read a report that Speaker John Boehner’s office distributed as evidence that sharp deficit reduction can lead to rapid economic expansion. The plan, it seems, is to create a bunch of unemployed public workers who’ll create more competition for the few open jobs in the private sector and thus drive wages down for everybody.... [T]he worst thing for an unemployed person is another unemployed person....
[The report's] argument is that in the mid-1990s, a number of small, European nations (and Canada) sharply cut government spending and saw rapid economic growth.... The problem, as the International Monetary Fund details... is that these countries understood that cutting government spending would kill demand, and so they compensated with policies that would keep demand strong. Those policies were 1) really aggressive efforts on the part of the central bank, 2) devaluing their currencies, and 3) living in the mid-1990s, when the global economy had one of its best-ever decades. Republicans oppose policies that would lead to #1 and #2, and 2011 is... very different... than 1994....
[O]ver the long-term, cutting deficits does help the economy. Unfortunately, over the short-term they do real harm: “A fiscal consolidation equal to 1 percent of GDP typically reduces GDP by about 0.5 percent within two years and raises the unemployment rate by about 0.3 percentage point.”...
[O]ne caveat... is that the countries in this report have higher taxes and more government spending than we do, and so it’s possible that raising taxes there does more damage than raising taxes here as taxes are already high over there, while cutting spending here would do more damage than cutting spending there as spending is lower here.
Friends really don't let friends support the Republican Party in any way...
