And how many jobs will it cost if the White House agrees to half the cuts? We need to be very careful here. It’s not like the Republicans have been calling for budget cuts in a vacuum. The President jumped on the budget bandwagon a good year-plus ago. It’s going to be difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to try to spin this against the GOP now. Though clearly a “we’re all for budget cuts, but they’re NUTS” message is the most useful at this point.

“Our sense is that the 60 billion dollars cut spread out in the normal way would reduce growth. But we think given the size it’s one to two tenths [of a percentage point reduction to gross domestic product], about a couple hundred thousand jobs,” he told the House Financial Services Committee. “It’s not trivial.”

Mind you, the Republicans promised to cut $100bn, not just $60bn. So the increase to unemployment, and the cut to GDP, is going to be significantly greater than what Bernanke said. What worries me, again, is how many jobs we lose if we cut $30bn from this year’s budget – “only” 100,000?

I’m all for balancing the budget. I’m not sure that even $100bn at this point means squat when we’re talking about damaging a very fragile only-quasi recovery.