Senate Republicans have so far gone three for three when it comes to filibustering President Obama’s American Jobs Act, having successfully blocked the bill from moving in its entirety, and then prevented two of its components from advancing individually. The GOP’s obstruction comes as the economy continues to improve at a glacial pace, with just 80,000 jobs created last month.

Next week, Senate Democrats will try again, this time with the portion of Obama’s bill providing tax credits to businesses that hire veterans:

Senate Democrats plan to roll out the next piece of President Obama’s jobs creation legislation – this part on veterans – next week.

The bill is aimed at incentivizing companies to hire war veterans. It includes a tax credit to encourage companies to hire veterans as well as additional tax credits for hiring veterans with “service-connected disabilities.”

At the moment, unemployment for veterans stands at 7.7 percent, but is at a substantially worse 12.1 percent for post-9/11 vets (up from 10.6 percent a year ago). If nothing else, surely the GOP can see the wisdom in letting this particular bit of Obama’s jobs bill though. “It’s expected to pass. It should pass,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

Of course, while they would be an undeniable help, tax credits for veterans are not enough to create all the jobs necessary to bring the unemployment rate down. As Center for American Progress chief economist Heather Boushey said today, “at this point in the recovery we should be seeing upwards of 300,000 jobs created per month, but the economy only added a paltry 80,000 jobs in October and the three-month pace of job creation is only 114,000…Washington has yet to pass the American Jobs Act, which economists across the board agree will generate new jobs.”

On Tuesday, Ohioans will vote on Issue 2, a referendum on Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s (R) anti-workers’ rights law Senate Bill 5 (SB5). The bill strips teachers, police, and firefighters of their rights to collective bargain for better wages and working conditions. The bill is deeply unpopular.

This, however, has not stopped right-wing groups from flushing the pro-SB5 campaign with money or conservatives from insisting that the law helps local governments by preventing layoffs.

But while most Republicans at least acknowledge that the law disadvantages public employees, one Republican thinks the opposite. This summer, Ohio Treasurer and U.S. Senate candidate Josh Mandel said he supported Senate Bill 5 because the law, in his mind, actually “respect[s] police, and firefighters, and teachers” by giving “fiscal conservatives” the tools to ignore collective bargaining rights, which somehow “insur[es]that there is a state and there are local governments” down the road:

MANDEL: Well I’ve been supportive of Senate Bill 5…In my mind, it’s not about going after police, and firefighters and teachers. It’s about respecting police, and firefighters, and teachers and insuring that there is a state and there are local governments long into the future so that we have communities here in the state. The current level of spending in our state and our country? Simply unacceptable. And I think we need to put the tools in the tool belts of local government leaders and also people who are fiscal conservatives to bring this state into a sense of fiscal health. And that’s one of the reasons I’ve been supportive.

Watch it:

In what must come as a surprise to Mandel, Ohio’s teachers, police, firefighters, and even veterans feel slighted — not respected — by this bill. SB5 strips unions of the right to negotiate wages, eliminates pay increases, and completely bans the right to strike. As public officials and unions both note, teachers and safety forces have already made substantial sacrifices — including zero pay raises and paying more for health insurance — to accommodate the tough economy.

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States and cities around the country have desperately slashed spending in the face of record budget deficits, including unpaving roads, shrinking schools, closing libraries, and even a failed attempt to decriminalize domestic violence.

The latest consequence of extreme austerity is in Highland Park, Michigan, which has not only turned off all of its streetlights, but also ripped out the light poles — a telling sign that its darkening of the streets is permanent. With an unemployment rate at 22 percent and a city debt of $58 million, Highland Park could no longer afford to pay the electric bills:

The city is $58 million in debt and has many more people than jobs, plus dozens of burned-out or vacant houses and buildings. With fewer than 12,000 residents, its population has dwindled to half the level from 20 years ago. Faced with a $4 million electric bill that required $60,000 monthly payments, Mayor Hubert Yopp asked the City Council to consider reducing lighting. Council members reluctantly approved it, even in an election year.

In Highland Park, “the median household income is $18,700, compared with $48,700 statewide. And 42 percent of the city’s residents live in poverty.” The city has seen a precipitous drop in population over the last few decades.

The drastic measure arrives just after Michigan’s 2011-12 state budget went into effect Oct. 1 — a budget that cuts millions of dollars in funding to cities and schools. Michigan had its own budget crisis to close. However, Gov. Rick Snyder (R) and the GOP-led legislature felt it could afford a $1.7 billion tax cut to businesses, even as the state cut $400 million in school and city aid. Snyder’s budget shifts the economic burden entirely to low-income residents by cutting 86 percent of business taxes, as it slashed the social safety net.

– Rebecca Leber

Senate Republicans yesterday, with the help of Sens. Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), blocked the latest piece of President Obama’s jobs act, which would have provided for $60 billion in infrastructure spending. Instead, the Senate GOP submitted a bill that would supposedly create jobs by crippling the government’s ability to regulate.

House Republicans, of course, won’t even bring up Obama’s jobs plan, instead deciding that the best way to address America’s crumbling infrastructure is to let loose with “drill, baby, drill“:

House Republicans plan to pass a bill by year’s end that would tie new infrastructure funding to federal revenue generated from an expansion of domestic energy production, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced Thursday.

Dubbing it the “opposite of stimulus,” Boehner said the new energy production plan would provide “a new devoted revenue stream” that could pay for the kind of infrastructure spending that President Obama is demanding as part of his jobs package.

Even with the unemployment rate barely creeping down and the U.S. facing a $2 trillion deficit in terms of infrastructure, the GOP refuses to move forward with funding unless it is also allowed to soil the environment through more oil drilling.

And its not as if Boehner’s own state of Ohio couldn’t use some help when it comes to infrastructure. In fact, 27 percent of the bridges in Boehner’s state are either “structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.” Ohio’s share of the national highway system has 171 bridges that are structurally deficient. 10 of those bridges are even located in Boehner’s own district.

Boehner this week tried to claim that “nobody” has crafted a bill that would fund infrastructure projects, even as Senate Democrats were bringing a bill to the floor that would pay for those projects with a miniscule surtax on the very wealthiest Americans. Instead, Boehner and the rest of the House GOP want to hold the nation’s infrastructure hostage to their Big Oil agenda.

Former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) has pegged his latest campaign push to deficits, taking a shot at Gov. Rick Perry’s (R-TX) seeming disregard for balancing the country’s accounts. Today, Romney will be laying out a plan that he claims will cut $500 billion from the deficit in 2016; his biggest cut is block granting Medicaid, while pretending that repealing the Affordable Care Act saves money. Other than that, Romney’s “savings” come from favorite conservative bogeymen like Amtrak and the National Endowment for the Arts.

During an event in New Hampshire last night previewing today’s release of his plan, Romney explained that, in his view, reducing the deficit is “a moral responsibility“:

“We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in, we have a moral responsibility not to pass onto our kids the spending of our generation,” he said. “It is a moral responsibility to believe in fiscal responsibility. We do, and I do.”

However, if it’s a moral responsibility to reduce the deficit, Romney may need to spend some time in an ethics course. He envisions federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, but his tax plan, as we found, will raise less than 17 percent of GDP in revenue. As Michael Linden has explained, the result of Romney’s plan “would be continued unsustainable deficits and more debt. In fact, Romney’s plan would yield approximately $6.5 trillion in deficits from 2013 through 2021.”

The revenue Romney envisions is “below the levels suggested by the House Republican Budget, which abolished Medicare as we know it, slashed Medicaid, and still didn’t balance the budget until 2040.” Nibbling away at Amtrak subsidies and slashing health care spending for low-income Americans doesn’t change the fact that Romney’s plan lets the richest Americans avoid paying their fair share, resulting in loads of red ink.