Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Even with today’s disappointing and troubling jobs report, private sector job creation under President Obama has far exceeded private sector job creation under President Bush. 40 months into his presidential term, there are currently more private sector jobs in the economy than when Obama came into office. At the same point in President Bush’s term, the total number of private sector jobs was still down 1.7 percent from where it began.

The numbers are even starker when measuring each president’s record from the moment job creation returned. Private sector job creation returned in February of 2010, the 13th month of President Obama’s term. Since then, the economy has added 4.3 million private sector jobs, a 4 percent increase.

Under President Bush, the economy stopped shedding private sector jobs in July of 2003, fully 30 months into his administration. From that point until May of 2004, the economy added just 1.5 million private sector jobs, an increase of only 1.4 percent.

But there is one area of job creation where President Bush clearly outshines President Obama: the public sector. Public sector employment is now down 608,000 workers since January 2009, a 2.7 percent decline. At the same point in President Bush’s term, public sector employment was up 3.7 percent. If, over the past 40 months, public sector employment had grown at the same pace as it did in President Bush’s first term, there would be 1.4 million additional people at work right now. That’d be enough to bring the unemployment rate down by nearly a full percentage point.

Workers at an Illinois plant for the mega manufacturer Caterpillar have been on strike for a month after rejecting a concession-heavy contract proposed by the company. Yesterday, workers overwhelmingly rejected a second Caterpillar offer, by a vote of 504-116.

According to union officials, the contract “provided no raises, eliminated the defined benefits pension program, weakened seniority rights and required machinists to pay higher contributions for health care.” All of this, at a time when the company is making record profits. In fact, Fortune Magazine recently said the company is “crushing it” when it comes to profitability.

At the same time that it is refusing to give its workers a fair raise, the company saw fit to increase its CEOs pay by 60 percent:

The annual compensation of Caterpillar Inc.’s chairman and chief executive rose 60 percent in 2011, as the company posted a record revenue of $60.1 billion.

Douglas Oberhelman earned $16.9 million in 2011, a figure that includes salary, bonuses, stock and option awards and retirement plan contributions. Oberhelman pay increase, which was tied to the company’s performance, included a $4.9 million cash payment, an 81 percent increase from his 2010 cash award. His base salary increased to $1.4 million from $1.1 million in 2010.

“The practice of raising executive compensation to obscene levels while making it harder for working families to pay for basic medical expenses is impossible to justify at a company as successful as Caterpillar,” said International Association of Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger.

The typical American worker would have to work 244 years in order to earn what the average CEO makes in just one year. Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.

Our guest blogger is Adam Hersh, an economist at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today’s news on the state of the US labor market is, in a word, miserable. But the persistent high level of unemployment and ebbing job creation we see in the headline numbers could be much better if policymakers stopped following the siren song of government austerity.

Since April 2009, government at all levels of the United States have shed 706,000 jobs and cuts in real government consumption and investment — that is, buying goods and services from the private sector — lopped $114 billion off the size of the U.S. economy since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and other policies wound down in the summer of 2010. That austerity, combined with the slumping international economy thanks to other austere governments around the world, is dragging down our economy and the jobs that it fuels.

But what if we hadn’t cut those jobs providing critical public services and investments? Under President Reagan, rather than shedding public service jobs, governments added more than 1.4 million jobs — or twice as many government jobs as have been cut in the current economy — by the time he left office. And rather than cutting government purchases from the private sector, government actually expanded by $410 billion under President Reagan.

Note that both the population and the economy of the United States were significantly smaller back then, so these stimuli under President Reagan were much larger in relative terms than what we are seeing today. If government jobs continued growing at the same rate as during Reagan’s presidency, today government employment would be 1.05 million jobs larger.

If we had only not lost those public service jobs, the unemployment rate would be 7.2 percent instead of 8.2 percent in May 2012. And that’s not even counting the many more private sector jobs that would be created through the “multiplier effect”–jobs and activity in one part of the economy fuel more jobs and activity elsewhere in the economy. In this case, these phantom government jobs would have fueled private sector businesses and employment that relied on consumption from the incomes of public service workers, public investments, and the public consumption from routine operation of government.

Earlier this week, Scott Walker tossed out the usual job creation report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and released his own numbers for Wisconsin’s job creation in 2011. Original reports said Wisconsin had lost 33,900 jobs in 2011, but Walker’s numbers showed Wisconsin gaining 23,321.

Walker claimed that the BLS had approved his new numbers. But, it turns out, BLS has done nothing of the sort. The Walker campaign emailed BLS to see if they could use a new formula to calculate job creation, and BLS approved that. But BLS never endorsed the outcome of that calculation, the numbers that Walker is touting.

Politiscoop got in touch with the BLS, which confirmed that the exchange was not about the specific numbers that Walker input into his new formula, but rather the formula itself:

Politiscoop contacted the BLS today for verification of the claim. It turns out to be one of Walker’s biggest lies to date. In a conversation with a BLS representative, we found that the state of Wisconsin submitted a new formula in regard to jobs created or lost in the state. [...]

The BLS said “The Bureau can not comment on the fourth quarter numbers because they haven’t been released. I can say that we would not have confirmed the numbers yet, but would only have confirmed the methods used.“

But without actual approval from BLS, Walker is still campaigning on that unconfirmed number, citing it as a statistic assessed by the BLS. Watch:

Not taking into account Walker’s numbers, Wisconsin has seen the largest job loss of any state over the last year. His attempt to improve the numbers seems to be a clear move to garner support in the run up to his hotly contested recall election, and to follow through on his promise of creating 250,000 jobs in his first term.

A growing number of Republicans have been abandoning Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge, which states that signers will never raise taxes at any point, for any reason, ever. Dozens of candidates promoted by the National Republican Congressional Committee have refused to sign the pledge.

Today, former Republican governor Jeb Bush (FL) told House Budget Committee ranking member Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) that he is against the Norquist pledge because, “I don’t believe you outsource your principles and convictions to people”:

VAN HOLLEN: Do you agree with the Grover Norquist pledge?

BUSH: So I ran for office three times. The pledge was presented to me three times. I never signed the pledge. I cut taxes every year I was governor. I don’t believe you outsource your principles and convictions to people. I respect Grover’s political involvement. He has it every right to do it, but I never signed any pledge.

Even ultra-right-wing conservatives have wavered on the Norquist pledge in recent months. “I signed this pledge, but what do we do when we get taxes down to where they need to be? At some point we’re going to cut taxes too much. What’s the answer then?” asked Rep. Steve King (R-IA)

Public sector job losses have held back economic growth during the recovery from the Great Recession, and more bad news came from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly employment report this morning. In May, federal, state, and local governments shed 13,000 jobs, adding to an already-record total of losses.

But Republicans ignore that government job losses are holding back the recovery, instead promising to shrink government employment even more. For instance, Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R) told CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin today that the Obama administration has caused a “huge, huge buildup” in the federal workforce that has slowed down private sector job growth:

TOOBIN: One of the striking things about this jobs report, and several of the recent months, ahs been that governments have been laying people off, that government hiring is, that states and localities, don’t have any money to hire people. One of the things you want to do is cut taxes and cut spending. Why do you wnat to see more layoffs of government employees when…employment is such a problem?

HENSARLING: Well, number one, we’ve seen a huge, huge build up, particularly of the federal workforce. What we need is to promote economic growth with fundamental tax reform, and then frankly there wouldn’t necessarily have to be any layoffs. But you’re not going to get fundamental, you’re not going to get economic growth with this president’s policies. And so, what we saw for a long time under the Obama administration and under his stimulus program, which obviously has clearly failed, is we saw private sector jobs lose out while he was increasing federal payrolls whether they needed to be increased or not.

Watch it:

Blaming growth in the federal workforce for the struggles of the private sector has become a favorite Republican talking point, but that doesn’t make it true. In the last three years, the public sector has shed more jobs than any three-year period on record, and more than 600,000 government workers have lost their jobs since Obama took office. The private sector, meanwhile, has now seen 27 consecutive months of job growth and recovered all of the jobs it lost in the opening months of Obama’s term.

The “huge, huge buildup” in the public workforce Hensarling claims took place would have certainly benefited the economy had it taken place, since adding jobs in sectors like education would have increased demand and driven growth. It hasn’t happened, though, because Republicans have repeatedly blocked efforts to send money to states to prevent further layoffs of teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other public employees.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics today reported that the economy created a disappointing 69,000 jobs last month, and that the unemployment rate increased to 8.2 percent. The job creation totals for March and April were both revised downward.

At the same time, borrowing rates for the U.S. government have hit lows never before seen:

Investors stampeded into U.S. government bonds Thursday, driving the interest rate on the 10-year Treasury note as low as 1.54 percent, a record…The record low rate beat the previous mark of 1.55 percent, which was set in November 1945. That was just after the end of World War II, when government price controls kept interest rates artificially low to preserve financial stability.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman explained today, “When the private sector is frantically trying to pay down debt, the public sector should do the opposite, spending when the private sector can’t or won’t. By all means, let’s balance our budget once the economy has recovered — but not now. The boom, not the slump, is the right time for austerity.”

Instead, Congress, driven by a cut-happy Republican House, has pursued austerity, leading to hundreds of thousands of public sector job losses. Last month alone, 7,000 state and local level education jobs disappeared.

It makes no sense to sustain these sort of economic body blows when the government can borrow on the cheap and use it to put people back to work. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), though, responded to the jobs report by criticizing the supposed “‘stimulus’ spending binge” (the existence of which is a myth), and Republicans have made no indication that serious job creation efforts are on their agenda.

Boehner, of course, neglected to mention that the spending cuts the GOP demanded in return for raising the debt ceiling will stifle job creation, and that the GOP refused to pass the Obama administration’s American Jobs Act, which economists said would create millions of jobs. In fact, Boehner has already indicated that he and the GOp will demand more spending cuts as the nation approaches its borrowing limit again later this year.