One year ago on Sunday, Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) — who is the subject of a recall effort — signed into law his high-profile union-busting bill. As he was preparing to sign the bill last year, Walker said that the law would help boost job creation in Wisconsin. “Moving forward the hard-working, professional public sector employees who show up to work every day and do an excellent job will help ensure Wisconsin has a business climate that allows the private sector to create 250,000 new jobs,” Walker said.

However, reality hasn’t been as kind as Walker’s rhetoric:

Wisconsin added thousands of jobs in January but Gov. Scott Walker is still far off pace for delivering on his promise to create 250,000 new private-sector positions by the end of his first term, according to state labor data released Thursday…The data shows Wisconsin added only 6,000 private sector jobs overall during the first 13 months of Walker’s administration, putting him on pace to create only 24,000 jobs by 2014. The governor issued a statement conceding there’s “a lot of work ahead of us.”

Not only has Walker’s union-busting law not led to the job growth he promised, but it also hasn’t led to the sort of budget savings he’d estimated. In fact, Wisconsin school administrators lambasted Walker for saying that school districts were in good financial shape after he signed the union-busting bill. “Contrary to news reports, school districts are not in good financial shape so whoever is saying that, it is not accurate,” said Greenfield School District Administrator Conrad Farner.

In addition, the argument can be made that the jobs Wisconsin did add while Walker was governor all came while his predecessor’s budget was still in effect.

Our guest blogger is Heather Boushey, Senior Economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The current economic recovery is going well if one looks at private sector job creation. The pace of private sector job creation is slower than in the recovery from the early 1990s recession, but it’s about the same as it was during the economic recovery in the early 2000s. In the first two years of both the current and early 2000s recovery, employment grew by 3.7 percent.

But since early 2009, governments at all levels have shed nearly 700,000 jobs, most of them at the state and local level. Since August of 2008 state and local governments have shed a total of 647,000 workers, of which 64 percent, or 416,000, were women workers.

When we compare total employment between the current and early 2000s recovery, the loss of public sector jobs pops out: Employment growth is 0.6 percent lower in this recovery than it would have been had government chosen not to hand out so many pink slips.

Last month there were 6,000 government layoffs, a much smaller number than in recent months, but still a drag on the recovery. And the crazy thing is that while policymakers cannot control the actions of private employers, they do control how much they add to the nation’s unemployment woes via government layoffs. Laying off teachers and police-officers as the nation struggles to get back to full employment is the wrong policy at the wrong time.

Last August’s deal to raise the nation’s debt ceiling included a provision setting the level of federal spending for the fiscal 2013 budget. However, House Republicans have made a lot of noise about potentially presenting a 2013 budget that cuts even deeper. During an interview with Fox Business yesterday, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) appeared open to such a move, indicating the GOP leadership’s willingness to renege on the spending level agreed to last year:

We put limits on how much discretionary spending we can have last year and this coming year, and frankly for the next eight years. But those are limits, they’re ceilings. We can certainly do more.

Watch it:

“We had a deal last August on the budget numbers, and we expect them to live with that deal,” said Sen. Patty Murray (WA). As Maddow Blog’s Steve Benen noted, “the result of this is — you guessed it — a possible government shutdown in an election year.”

And this is just one more instance in which Boehner is being pulled along by the more conservative members of his caucus. This week, Boehner had to dump one of his top priorities — a transportation funding bill — when conservatives revolted. Boehner has now indicated he will bring up the Senate’s transportation bill, which he will presumably pass with the help of Democrats in the House.

Mitt Romney’s campaign sent out a press release this morning touting the endorsement of the Times Daily, a newspaper out of Florence, Alabama, but omitted key portions from the paper’s editorial that criticized Romney’s tax plan as being overly generous to the wealthy. Romney’s press release replaced the following paragraph, among others, with ellipses:

In fact, this newspaper does not embrace many of his ideas on taxation, which give too great a reward to the wealthy and not enough help for the poor and middle class. If Romney is elected, we hope he moves closer to the center.

Indeed, Romney’s tax plan would be a massive tax cut for the wealthy, giving nearly half of the benefit to the richest 5 percent of Americans. More than 25 percent of the benefit would go to the richest 1 percent, giving the top 0.1 percent a $264,000 tax cut.

So even a group supporting Romney is concerned about his tax plan ignoring the middle class.

Romney has a habit of redacting embarrassing portions from newspaper editorials that endorse him, having done it several times before.

The country added an additional 227,000 jobs in February as the economy continues to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. However, last month, as with every month for the past year and a half, the improving overall jobs number was stymied by public sector job losses, with 6,000 workers laid off from the Postal Service.

In 2011, an average of 22,000 public sector workers lost their jobs every month. In fact, if government jobs had even held steady since President Obama took office, over half a million more Americans would be going to work this morning.

The problem is clear in the following chart showing the recovery of private sector jobs (blue line) versus the hemorrhage of public sector jobs (red line):

Republican presidential candidates are as cognizant as anyone about the massive number of government employees being laid off by federal, state, and local governments. Their solution? More budget cuts and more public sector layoffs.

On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney told a New Hampshire crowd last year that, as president, he’d like to fire even more government workers. “We just have too many” public sector employees, Romney said, “and they’re paid too much.” Rick Santorum’s plan to cut $5 trillion in federal spending would undoubtedly lead to significantly higher government job losses.

It’s clear that even as the economic recovery continues, it will fall short of its full potential so long as governments continue to shed thousands of jobs. President Obama has proposed to address this problem by creating public sector jobs to repair our nation’s crumbling infrastructure. The Republican presidential candidates have proposed to address this problem by exacerbating it.

Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the economy continues to recover — albeit slowly — with 227,000 jobs created in February. The number of jobs created in December and January were also revised upwards, adding more than 60,000 jobs to total employment. The wider U-6 measure of underemployment fell below 15 percent for the first time since January 2009.

The economy has now added 1.2 million jobs in the last six months, the best six month stretch since 2006. The private sector has had nearly two years of job growth. However, the Republican National Committee, in a statement released shortly after the jobs report was made public, claimed that the economy is “clearly not improving“:

Today’s jobs report is yet another reminder that far too many Americans are out of work, and the situation is clearly not improving. Millions of families continue to feel the pain of the sluggish Obama economy and the rising cost of gas, groceries, and healthcare. They are still waiting on President Obama to keep his promise of an economic recovery.

The RNC, of course, called for spending cuts and entitlement reform to somehow boost the economy. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) called for many of the same things in his reaction to the jobs report. This, despite the fact that Europe has been trying the austerity track for months now, and the result has been nothing short of disastrous.

At a time when conservatives are positioning themselves as defenders of the Catholic Church on religious liberties and contraception, they seem to be far off from the Church’s teachings on other public policy issues.

While many conservatives belittle and mock anyone who takes assistance from the government, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sent a letter to lawmakers this week urging them not to cut funding for social safety net programs that help the poor, many of which have been targeted by Republican lawmakers in their quest to implement austerity to reduce the budget deficit.

“We fear the pressure to cut vital programs that protect the lives and dignity of the poor and vulnerable will increase,” wrote Bishops Stephen Blaire and Richard Pates, the Chairmen of the Committee on Domestic Justice and the Committee on International Justice, respectively.

Specifically, they singled out spending on health care, Pell Grants, affordable housing — which they called “essential for human dignity” — and food stamps. Just today, Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) panel on government oversight held a hearing on food stamp fraud that critics saw as pretense to gin up sentiment in favor of making cuts to the program.

And as many lawmakers are trying to undo the defense cuts contained in the “sequestration” triggered by last summer’s debt ceiling deal, the bishops suggested that defense should not be spared while social programs get cut:

We are also very concerned with proposals to eliminate the “firewall” that currently exists between defense and nondefense spending. Elimination of this firewall would mean that poverty-related domestic and international programs would compete with other more powerful interests and less essential priorities.

Read the full letter here.