The late David Levine's caricature of Bolton

In Iowa, the typically über-hawkish Fox News commentator pleaded with event attendees to support Romney even though he “may not have been your perfect candidate,” and later told the crowd:

A dollar well spent on American defense is a lot different than a dollar spent with the Department of Health and Human Services. It’s qualitatively different.

Romney is trying to base his campaign for president on his (dubious) record as a job creator (at the expense of all other issues, including Bolton’s forté, foreign policy).

But Bolton’s idea won’t help Romney’s campaign theme. He’s right: Military spending is “qualitatively different,” but not quite in the way that Bolton means. According to a University of Massachusetts, Amherst, study, military spending creates fewer jobs than other government spending. Here’s a chart published in the study:

So actually, a dollor spent on the military is “different”: it’s less valuable in terms of job creation than spending on government programs such as those administered precisely by the Department of Health and Human Services. This, however, will probably be news to Mitt Romney and his generously-spending militaristic advisers. What shouldn’t be news to the Romney campaign however, is Bolton’s push to rob social security and health care spending to give more money to the military.

Mitt Romney, though, thinks that HP’s CEO would make a great governor.

Just last week, Romney stated that if HP CEO Meg Whitman had won her bid for governor, the state of California would be in a much better financial situation:

I wish Californians had elected Meg Whitman. She would have been more successful and explained to Californians the need to cut back on spending and eliminate unnecessary programs. There are other states that have very different records. I think it’s interesting that the state with the highest or among the highest tax rates in the nation also has the worst or near the worst deficit.

California does have a devastatingly high unemployment rate — 10.9 percent — but if all of the HP workers who are getting laid off lived in the state, its unemployment rate would be pushed over the 11 percent line.

Meanwhile, the spending cuts Whitman and Romney advocate wouldn’t actually help the state economy. As Center for American Progress economist Adam Hersh noted in 2011, the states that have cut the most spending have shed the most jobs.

Romney continued that narrative today, telling Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin that his policies would reduce unemployment to 6 percent by the end of his first term in 2016:

ROMNEY: Over a period of 4 years, by virtue of the policies that we put in place, we get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, perhaps a little lower.

Watch it:

Though 6 percent unemployment is significantly lower than the current 8.1 percent rate, the feat isn’t all that remarkable. In fact, it is exactly where multiple government agencies project unemployment will be at the end of that time frame. The Congressional Budget Office predicts that unemployment will average 6.3 percent in 2016; the Office of Management and Budget, meanwhile, projects unemployment will hit 6.1 percent and ultimately fall below 6 percent the same year.

Republican governors in states across the country, including some states that will play a pivotal role in deciding the November election, are taking a different view of the situation. Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R), for instance, issued a press release this morning touting “encouraging indicators that Florida’s economy is steadily moving in the right direction,” telling his constituents that nearly a quarter-million jobs were available:

SCOTT: Today’s unemployment report adds to the series of encouraging indicators that Florida’s economy is steadily moving in the right direction. With 243,594 job openings listed by various help-wanted websites and our unemployment rate down 2.2 points to 8.7%, more Floridians are finding new jobs throughout the Sunshine State.

Scott isn’t alone. Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s (R) web site featured a blog post touting the “thousands of Virginians working again” and the ways in which the state’s economy is recovering:

MCDONNELL: Virginia is growing strong again. Through a bipartisan effort in Richmond, and the hard-work, innovation and dedication of the people of Virginia, our economy is recovering. There is a lot to celebrate in our Commonwealth. With unemployment at over a 3-year low, agricultural exports at a record high, and thousands of Virginians working again, this is a great time to recognize all the great things happening in our tremendous Commonwealth.

And during an April event with Romney, Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) told Otterbein University students that there are tens of thousands of open jobs and that “we’re doing much better in Ohio now“:

KASICH: We have a web site called Ohio Means Jobs. There’s probably about 80,000 jobs listed on there. … Look through that, and you’re going to find a lot of exciting opportunities. … There’s a lot of really exciting things in this state where you can go and work.

Across the country, in fact, unemployment rates are falling and jobs are returning to state economies, as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest jobs report detailed last week. As Romney continues to ignore the fact that the economy is recovering, facts — and the Republican governors who have endorsed him — are telling a different story.

Wisconsin, in fact, saw the largest decrease in employment last year, making it one of only four states to lose jobs. But Walker on Saturday doubled down on his promise to create 250,000 jobs:

Gov. Scott Walker recommitted Saturday to his pledge to create 250,000 private-sector jobs by 2015, a promise all the more difficult to achieve since he first made it because of anemic job growth during his tenure. [...]

“It’s a commitment I made in 2010 and it’s a commitment I make today,” Walker said.

As Menzie Chinn noted as Econbrowser, Walker has a long way to go to make that happen. The green line represents the pace of job creation Walker needs to attain, while the blue line is what’s actually happening:

Of course, Walker could always use the trick pulled by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) and simply pretend that his promise on jobs never happened (video evidence to the contrary).

Romney eventually stopped repeating the talking point, which advisers had difficulty defending under pressure, and now it seems Boston has completely Etch A Sketched the number and severely lowered the number of jobs Romney is supposed to have created at Bain.

BuzzFeed’s Zeke Miller reports that, in the wake of the Obama campaign’s new ad attacking Romney’s record at Bain, the “new Romney jobs math” is significantly more modest than the old. This time, the campaign is asserting that Romney created a meager and vague “thousands of jobs” at Bain and “tens of thousands” of jobs as governor of Massachusetts.

This is nothing less than an admission from the Romney campaign that their 100,000 jobs claim was entirely bogus, and acceptance that Romney created vastly fewer jobs than he claimed he had just a few months ago. It’s a welcome return to reality, but calls into question any piece of evidence the campaign puts forward. (In 1994, he claimed in an ad that he created 10,000 jobs at Bain.)

Meanwhile, even the “thousands of jobs” figure should be suspect, as the evidence the campaign offers to support it is an editorial from the right-wing Washington Examiner endorsing Romney. Could the Romney campaign not find a single better piece of evidence — a news article, government data, or economist’s estimate, for instance — than an unsubstantiated opinion article from a paper that is simultaneously declaring that it favors Romney’s election?

And his assertion on his record as governor also fails to include the context that his state was 47th out of 50 on job creation.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the unemployment rate would be a full point lower — at 7.1 percent — if these job losses hadn’t happened:

The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. Friday’s employment report showed the cuts continued in April, with 15,000 government jobs lost. [...]

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

These cuts have occurred because of state budget cuts as well as budget cuts at the federal level. President Obama addressed this issue today, saying, “the only time government employment has gone down during a recession has been under me. So I make that point just so you don’t buy into this whole bloated government argument that you’re hearing.”

Despite the GOP’s big talk, historical data shows that private sector job creation is better when a Democrat occupies the White House. Since President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, in fact, nearly two-thirds of the 66 million private sector jobs added to the economy have come under Democratic presidents, Bloomberg reports:

The BGOV Barometer shows that since Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, non-government payrolls in the U.S. swelled by almost 42 million jobs under Democrats, compared with 24 million for Republican presidents, according to Labor Department figures.

Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans. Through April, Democratic presidents accounted for an average of 150,000 additional private-sector paychecks per month over that period, more than double the 71,000 average for Republicans.

After the economy added more than 20 million jobs under President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, it fared much worse under his successor, Republican George W. Bush, who added just 1 million jobs in eight years. Bush had the “worst track record for job creation since the government began keeping records,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The private sector continued to shed jobs in the opening months of the Obama presidency, but as of April, those jobs have all returned.

Republicans, for all of their hatred of government, actually have a slightly better record than Democrats when it comes to creating public sector jobs. Under Obama, local, state, and federal governments have shed more than 600,000 jobs, making the Great Recession the first in modern history in which the public sector lost jobs. Had those jobs been maintained, the unemployment rate would be 7.1 percent, a full point lower than it is now.

As of April, there are now more private sector jobs in the United States than there were in January 2009, when President Obama took office. You read that right. We have now replaced all of the private sector jobs lost while Obama has been president. And that was no mean feat, given that over the course of 2009, the private sector shed about 4.2 million jobs.

Unfortunately, the news is not nearly so good when it comes to the public sector, where there are currently 607,000 fewer people working than there were when President Obama took office.

The chart below tells the whole story. Under President Obama, the private sector has experienced a relatively robust recovery, and is now back to where it started when he took office. The public sector continues to shed jobs, and as a result, the overall jobs picture in the US remains weak. If you want to understand why conservative efforts to slash funding for teachers, firefighters, cops is bad for the economy, look no further than this graph.

ROMNEY: We should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month. This is way, way off from what should happen in a normal recovery.

Watch it:

Romney’s call for 500,000 jobs a month would certainly make for a faster economic recovery. That sort of growth, however, is hardly “normal,” as Romney claims. As the chart below shows, there have only been 16 months since 1939 — and only four in the last 50 years — in which the economy added 500,000 jobs or more:

It isn’t the first time Romney has made unreasonable claims about the economy. Romney released a tax plan in March that would reduce federal revenues by more than $6 trillion because of its massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Despite that number, Romney says his plan won’t add to the deficit, but economic analysis of the plan shows the economy would have to grow 6.8 percent a year for five years — significantly faster than it has in any five-year period in recent history. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden and Seth Hanlon said at the time, Romney’s plan is “implausible, to say the least.”

Not only are Romney’s claims unrealistic and borderline impossible, his economic plan also provides no path toward such growth. Romney’s policies, according to a Republican National Committee official, would be the same as former President George W. Bush’s, “just updated.” Those tax cutting policies, of course, failed to create jobs or stimulate economic growth and instead left the country with the massive budget deficit and sputtering economy Romney now claims he’ll fix.

Romney has staked his campaign on his knowledge of the economy. But as his former primary opponent Rick Santorum said in March, “If Mitt Romney’s an economic heavyweight, we’re in trouble.”

A report released yesterday by consulting firm Headwaters Economics continues to shed light on the economic importance of protected public lands to local economies in the American West.

It finds that there were more than four times as many jobs created in non-metro counties with protected public lands compared to those without. This data contradicts the ideological rhetoric of many Republicans seeking to throw open more federal acres to mining and drilling.

As the report states, over 40 years:

Western non-metro counties with more than 30% of lands federally protected increased jobs by 344%.

The chart below shows that from 1970 to 2009 (the most recent data available), the more protected public lands (national parks, national monuments, wilderness areas, etc.) that were in a rural county, the more jobs created.  This compares to only an 80% increase for counties with no protected federally-managed places at all.

In part, this trend occurred because land conservation creates a wide variety of jobs.  In 2010, recreation and tourism spurred 388,000 jobs on Interior Department-managed lands and 224,000 in and around national forests. Echoing these facts, a group of 104 economists sent a letter to the president in November asking him to create jobs by protecting more special places for recreation.

This latest data contradicts the mantra of many western Republican lawmakers, who contend that protected public lands are “locked up” by the government and have no value.  For example, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forest and Public Lands, has stated:

Contrary to claims by the administration and others, the designation of national monuments and wilderness are not a boon to local economies, but rather a detriment in most scenarios.

That is just plain wrong.

Jessica is the Manager of Research and Outreach for the Public Lands Project.

In the postwar U.S., higher top tax rates tend to go with higher economic growth — not lower. Indeed, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, GDP annual growth per capita (to adjust for population growth) averaged 1.68% between 1980 and 2010 when top tax rates were relatively low, while growth averaged 2.23% between 1950 and 1980 when top tax rates were at or above 70%.

Neither does international evidence support a case for lower growth from higher top taxes. There is no clear correlation between economic growth since the 1970s and top tax-rate cuts across Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries.

Saez and Diamond also note that growth can be boosted if the revenue raised from higher taxes gets spend on infrastructure or other public investments. “The neglect of public investment over the last few decades suggests that the returns could be quite high,” they wrote.

As this chart shows, job growth has been weakest when the top tax rate was at its lowest:

In fact, job growth has been stronger when taxes are higher overall:

Of course, none of this should be construed as proving that higher taxes cause better job growth. But the Republican claim that higher taxes will blunt job growth is most certainly not true, as the data shows.

Over the year, nonfarm employment increased in 45 states and the District of Columbia, decreased in 4 states, and was unchanged in Alabama. The largest over-the-year percentage increase occurred in North Dakota (+6.5 percent). The largest over-the-year percentage decrease in employment occurred in Wisconsin (-0.9 percent).

Walker, meanwhile, told Newsmax this week that, “We ultimately saw a net increase in jobs this year.” That is incorrect, unless by ‘we’ he means a group other than Wisconsinites.

This just adds more evidence to an already existing trend: states with the most drastic budget cuts are seeing the most job losses. Budget slashing at the state level is stalling growth and reducing GDP.

Supplementing that argument are the employment totals for just the month of March. Ohio, which is led by austerity-happy Gov. John Kasich (R), lost 9,500 jobs. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) saw his state drop 8,600 jobs. And Wisconsin dropped 4,500 last month.

The era of austerity clearly hasn’t worked. Instead, these statistics show that conservative budgets have made things worse in the states where they were supposedly going to turn economies around.

While there’s strong demand in science, education and health fields, arts and humanities flounder. Median wages for those with bachelor’s degrees are down from 2000, hit by technological changes that are eliminating midlevel jobs such as bank tellers. Most future job openings are projected to be in lower-skilled positions such as home health aides, who can provide personalized attention as the U.S. population ages.

Taking underemployment into consideration, the job prospects for bachelor’s degree holders fell last year to the lowest level in more than a decade.

Recent graduates are struggling to find mid- and high-level jobs upon graduating and are increasingly turning to jobs in restaurants and retail. As a result, median wages have dropped.

The high jobless and underemployment rate could have long-term consequences for the American economy. Total student loan debt surpassed $1 trillion this year, and the rate of delinquency on those loans is already disturbingly high. Though college graduates earn significantly more than workers with only a high school diploma, the inability of college graduates to find adequate employment could drive those delinquencies even higher. Worse yet, it could plague more workers with life-long debt, preventing them from forming new households or purchasing more consumer goods.