House Republicans rode into the majority with an explicit promise to spur job creation, repeating the mantra “where are the jobs?” over and over during the buildup to November’s election. However, since they’ve come into office, Republicans have spent their time on anything but job creation, bringing up bills repealing the Affordable Care Act and restricting a woman’s right to choose, while pushing for a series of budget cuts that would result in widespread job loss.

In fact, according to a new analysis by economists at Goldman Sachs entitled “Spending Showdowns and Government Shutdowns: Effects on Growth,” the package of spending cuts passed by House Republicans over the weekend will reduce economic growth by 1.5 to 2 percentage points in the next two quarters:

The spending cut package that passed the House of Representatives would have a deeper effect. Under the House passed spending bill, the drag on GDP growth from federal fiscal policy would increase by 1.5pp to 2pp in Q2 and Q3 compared with current law.

This would be a significant drop, as analysts only expect growth of four percent over those quarters. And as CAP economist Adam Hersh pointed out:

From the rule of thumb “Okun’s Law,” a 2 percent increase in GDP is associated with a 1 percent decrease in the unemployment rate. Based on this relationship, the Republican CR could cause unemployment to shoot from 9 percent up to 9.7-10 percent.

Republicans have been trying to claim that their budget slashing plan will lead to job creation (even as Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) shrugged off the obvious negative effect such cuts will have on public employment). But as Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “this nonpartisan study proves that the House Republicans’ proposal is a recipe for a double-dip recession…This analysis puts a dagger through the heart of their ‘cut-and-grow’ fantasy.”

Earlier this month, the Economic Policy Institute released a report finding that the $100 billion in discretionary spending cuts that the House GOP passed last weekend would result in the loss of nearly one million jobs. “Cuts of this magnitude will undermine gross domestic product performance at a time when the economy is seeing anemic post-recession growth,” wrote EPI’s Rebecca Theiss.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) has justified his attempt to strip many of Wisconsin’s public sector employees of their collective bargaining rights by pointing to the state’s budget deficit. “The legislation I’ve put forward is about one thing. It’s about balancing our budget now — and in the future,” Walker said in an address last night.

Today, Wisconsin’s Republican officials took to the airwaves to disseminate the message, with Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Sen. Ron Johnson both claiming that legislative union busting is necessary to fix Wisconsin’s budget woes:

LT. GOV. KLEEFISCH: These are facts and these are figures. There’s no negotiation on a budget that’s based on facts. We’re facing a $3.6 billion budget deficit in our next biennium. That means we need to have serious cuts…The collective bargaining is also a fiscal piece of this.

SEN. JOHNSON: Gov. Walker, this was dumped in his lap. A $3.6 billion biennial budget deficit. And he’s trying to fix it. He’s stepping up to the plate. And the Republican legislature is stepping up to the plate to actually fix the problem, making the hard choices…Let’s face it, in terms of electoral politics, the largest interest group was public sector labor unions.

Watch a compilation:

Wisconsin’s Republican officials are using the legitimate economic anxiety being felt across the country to push for changes that wouldn’t improve Wisconsin’s budget situation one iota. As Tim Fernholz wrote in the National Journal:

The state’s entire budget shortfall for this year — the reason that Walker has said he must push through immediate cuts — would be covered by the governor’s relatively uncontroversial proposal to restructure the state’s debt. By contrast, the proposals that have kicked up a firestorm, especially his call to curtail the collective-bargaining rights of the state’s public-employees, wouldn’t save any money this year.

Gov. Mitch Daniels (R-IN) — who successfully stripped public employees of their collective bargaining rights in 2005 — was asked yesterday how such a move helps a state with its budget and had no answer at all. Wisconsin officials have informed Walker that his bill would actually result in the state losing $46 million in federal funds that are contingent on workers having collective bargaining rights.

As Adam Serwer wrote at The Plum Line, “this is no longer about ‘fiscal responsibility.’ It’s about whether or not public workers have a right to organize in their own interests — a right a majority of Americans support.” And it’s worth remembering that Walker has implemented a series of tax cuts that make the state’s long-term budget picture substantially worse.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) has been gaining lots of attention at the moment for his attempt to strip collective bargaining from many of his state’s public employees, essentially busting their union legislatively. But he is far from alone among Republican governors in trying to take a pound of flesh from his state’s working people.

Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), for instance, proposed a budget yesterday that holds property tax rebates for seniors hostage to benefit cuts for public employees: if public sector workers don’t agree to the cuts, property tax rebates don’t go out. And of course, Christie has rhetorically bashed teachers’ unions since he came into office, in order to score political points. During an appearance on MSNBC today, Christie actually bragged that his state leads the nation in terms of public sector layoffs, claiming that “unions are trying to break the middle class”:

USA Today recently said that New Jersey has shed by percentage more public sector jobs in the last year than any state in America. And the reason we’ve done this is because our government was bloated and too big at every level…In New Jersey, we’re not trying to break the unions, the unions are trying to break the middle class in New Jersey, through the expenses. And they’re close to doing it.

Watch it:

Because of his mass layoffs of public employees, the number of unemployed workers has actually increased in New Jersey since Christie took office. And Christie’s assertion that unions are not good for the middle class is quite troubling.

As David Madland and Karla Walter pointed out, “the middle class is markedly stronger when workers join together in unions.” In fact, the decline in unionization rates over the last forty years has been almost perfectly mirrored by a drop in middle-class incomes. Income inequality in the U.S. is the worst its been since the 1920′s, with nearly 25 percent of the total income in the country going to the richest one percent. The richest 10 percent of Americans control 2/3rds of the country’s net worth.

When unionization rates were high, prosperity was broadly shared, and workers were able to enjoy their fair share of productivity gains. But the overall economy is also stronger when unions are strong: “From 1947 to 1973, the period when unions were strongest and nearly one-third of workers were organized, U.S. economic output nearly tripled in size, growing at an average of 3.8 percent annually.” Since 2001, economic output has been just 2.2 percent annually.