The House Republican Response To Weak Jobs Report? Do Less.

In the Reality-Based Community, the disappointing job reports are evidence we need our government to do more to get the economy on sound footing. In Conservative Fiction Land, the disappointing jobs reports are evidence we need to go back to the policies that gave us disastrous job reports.

The House Majority Leader John Boehner and House Minority Leader Eric Cantor each released statements following today\’s monthly jobs report, each bereft of serious policy alternatives.

Rep. Cantor offers no policy specifics for creating jobs beyond \”cut spending immediately,\” which he appears to imply would \”enable[e] small business people to invest and grow\” but doesn\’t actually make any argument why having less public dollars and less economic demand would lead to such a result.

His other grand idea is not an idea to do something, but block something — to prevent the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy from expiring this year. Of course, he suggests with rhetorical sleight-of-hand that \” families and small businesses\” would face higher taxes under Democratic proposals, when only family incomes of over $250,000 would be affected.

Rep. Boehner\’s statement couldn\’t be bothered with explaining any actual ideas, but it does make the effort to hyperlink to a set of thin Republican proposals cobbled together back in January.

The only \”plan\” in the package specific to jobs is the informercial huckster-sounding \”GOP No-Cost Jobs Plan\” — which features previously failed ideas such as having fewer regulations on things like oil drilling, spending less in jobless aid, and never raising taxes on the wealthy until the unemployment rate drops below 5 percent.

(Remember when conservatives were clamoring to raise taxes on the wealthy when the unemployment was below 5 percent? Oh right, that never happened.)

The lesson out of the recent jobs reports is clear: we are creating more jobs under the Recovery Act than under than lower taxes and fewer rules for the wealthy, but not enough.

The reality-based solution: expand the Recovery Act. The conservative fiction solution: more tax cuts and fewer rules for the wealthy.

Take your pick.