

(Gage Skidmore/Flikr) How many jobs will Rand Paul's plan create?

Ouch. This is just the headline forfact check on the Republican jobs bill: "The GOP’s ludicrous claim about their jobs bill." Ludicrous seems generous.

The crux of the problem is the claim that the plan, "mostly a mish-mash of previous offered bills, such as that hardy perennial—a balanced budget amendment to the constitution," would create five million jobs. So the fact checker, aka Glenn Kessler, digs down into the methodology used by Republican Sens. Rand Paul, John McCain and Rob Portman to claim that five million figure.

Moira Bagley, a spokesman for Paul, said the figure was derived from three proposals: individual and corporate tax cuts that reduced the top tax rate of 25 percent, which the Heritage Foundation said would boost employment by 1.6 million jobs over the next decade; a tax holiday allowing U.S. companies to return cash held overseas, which a Chamber of Commerce study said would create 2.9 million jobs in two years; and a study by energy consultant Wood MacKenzie, which said allowing access to domestic energy resources and imports of Canadian oil would generate more than 1 million jobs by 2018. There are several problems with these figures.

And those problems aren't just that they come from the country's leading right-wing think tank, the Chamber of Commerce, and an oil industry flack: none of these studies say anything about creating jobs in the near term. The conclusion:

The 5 million figure cited by Paul, and echoed by other Republicans, is ludicrous. Even if one accepts the studies that came up with the figures, in most cases they indicate the GOP proposals would do little to create jobs in the near future.

The Republicans weren't serious about creating a jobs plan, obviously. They just needed something, anything, out there to say that they had one to answer the White House and Democrats. What they delivered was a load of warmed over right-wing hash.