Remember this?

19 days in, GOP leadership takes credit for job growth It took less than three weeks for the new Republican Congressional leadership to claim credit for an apparent economic upturn.

Well, in light of today's jobs report, Republicans are doing their best to make you forget.

The drop in the unemployment rate last month wasn't enough, Republicans said Friday in reaction to the latest jobless numbers. The GOP used the report showing that the unemployment rate had dropped to nine percent as a pretext for calling for new spending cuts, and attack President Obama's stimulus policies. "Instead of more ‘stimulus’ spending and more debt, as the president proposed in his State of the Union address, we need less spending, more freedom, and more certainty for those in America who create jobs," House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement.

That's a load of crap. Not only have Republicans have done absolutely nothing to boost job creation since taking control of Congress, the only economic ideas they've proposed are making things worse.

The beginning and end of every Republican discussion about the economy is that we need to immediately reduce spending. Actually, the opposite is true. Since last February, there's been 1.3 million new private sector jobs. However during the same period there's been a loss of 255,000 government jobs at the local, state, and federal levels. (That doesn't include the Census hiring bubble -- since then, there's been a lost of 761,000 government jobs.)

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that cutting government employment in the middle of an economic recovery is a bad idea. If you're trying to put people to work, putting them out of work is idiotic. But that's the Republican agenda, and as long as they get their way, economic recovery is going to take far longer than it should.