We’ve
long argued that the Republican Party is no longer a legitimate
governing party. Never mind whether we agree with them on any particular
policy issue, they are simply no longer a serious organization.
That
fact was underscored again this week and over the weekend, in light of
the release of two different official reports, one from the U.S. State
Department on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project and another from
the Congressional Budget Office on the economic outlook in light of the
Affordable Care Act.
Never mind whether you agree with the
Republican position on either of those two policies. The fact that the
party feels it necessary to blatantly
about what’s in each
of those reports, specifically with regard to “job creation,” in order
to advocate for their own policy positions, underscores yet again that
these are simply not serious people are worth being taken seriously
anymore …
If it
receives approval from both the State Department and the White House,
the proposed Keystone XL pipeline would ship dirty tar sands oil from
Alberta, Canada, down to the Gulf of Mexico to be shipped overseas.
After
years of claims by Republicans that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline
would “create tens of thousands of jobs,” we now have some hard numbers
on that, at least from the U.S. State Department, if you choose to
believe them.
claiming
that the pipeline “will create over 20,000 direct jobs and 100,000
indirect jobs.” On Friday, as the State Department released its
reiterating his previous claim that the pipeline would bring “more than 100,000 jobs.”
The
trouble is, that’s not true. At least according to the actual State
Department report, which was the occasion for Boehner’s Friday
statement.
The
report is long and in many pieces, so, naturally, it’d be too much to
ask of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives or anybody in
his office to actually read it before issuing a statement about it.
Nonetheless, it comes with a reasonably brief
Executive Summary [PDF] (just 44 pages) in which it speaks directly to the issue of jobs in relation to KXL.
In
the section on “Economic Activity During Construction” (page 26), the
report estimates that “Construction spending would support a combined
total of approximately 42,100 jobs throughout the United States for the
up to 2-year construction period.”
That sounds pretty good! Until one bothers to keep reading. “A
job consists of one position that is filled for one year. The term
support means
jobs ranging from new jobs (i.e., not previously existing) to the
continuity of existing jobs in current or new locations.”
Approximately
16,100 of those temporary jobs would be “direct jobs at firms that are
awarded contracts for goods and services, including construction” and
the rest, “approximately 26,000,” would be the result of “indirect or
induced spending.” In other words, that would be “goods and services
purchased by the construction contractors and spending by employees
working for either the construction contractor or for any supplier of
goods and services required in the construction process.”
So, in
addition to people who work for suppliers (where they may already be
employed prior to the approval of KXL), people who work at restaurants
or motels near the construction site or for any of the suppliers, also
count as “jobs” in this estimate. For example, the report cites
“ranchers providing beef for restaurants and construction camps.”
Fair
enough. Two years of jobs for those folks, many of whom will be able to
continue working in the jobs they already have (so those jobs are not
“created,” per se, by the construction of the pipeline.)
After
it’s built, however, either one or two years later, according to the
very next section of the Executive Summary titled “Economic Activity
During Operations,” the report states quite clearly [
emphasis added]:
Once the proposed Project enters service, operations
would require approximately 50 total employees in the United States: 35
permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors.
That’s
it. The Keystone XL Pipeline will offer 35 permanent jobs in the U.S.
for the life of the pipeline, according to the U.S. State Department’s
final analysis.
That’s a far cry from Boehner’s claim on Friday,
after the report came out, that KXL would bring “more than 100,000 jobs … with it.”
Of
course, Boehner’s hardly the only one in the Republican Party
disingenuously making such unsupported claims about KXL. Last year, GOP
Chairman Reince Priebus took to Facebook
to claim that “The Keystone Pipeline would create thousands of jobs.” Last week, he took to Twitter
to claim that “721,000 construction jobs have been lost, #Keystone remains unapproved.”
Perhaps
Priebus was referring to something other than Keystone with that
721,000 number — it’s unclear from his tweet — but if his message was
unclear, that would be no accident. His quarter of a million followers
on Twitter heard it loud and clear. He, like Boehner, was willing to lie
to them in order to advocate for the pipeline — a pipeline that would
result in
35 permanent American jobs.
Again, whether you
support or oppose the pipeline doesn’t really matter. Whether you feel
temporary jobs are good enough, that’s fine. But knowingly lying about
the jobs that it will or won’t “create” is what we find grotesquely
offensive here.
Obamacare Jobs Lie
This one was a doozy. On Tuesday, a
new report [PDF] on
the economic outlook for the U.S. through 2024 was released by the
nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Republicans couldn’t wait to
mischaracterize lie about what it said.
As usual, Fox “News” led the charge on behalf of Republican officials (who repeated the lie all day), claiming that
“ObamaCare could lead to loss of nearly 2.3 million US jobs, report says.”
The
National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) was just one of dozens of
other official GOP mouthpieces to echo the completely misleading claim.
For the record, other non-right-wing outlets also
badly mischaracterized the report. The Republicans were very happy about that, and couldn’t be bothered to correct the error.
No,
the CBO did not claim Obamacare will lead to the loss of either 2.3
million or 2.5 million jobs, as the Republicans lied all day on Tuesday.
As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker columnist
Glenn Kessler explained in
awarding three out of four “Pinocchios” to those who deliberately
mislead about the CBO’s projection on ACA-related employment numbers,
“No, CBO did not say Obamacare will kill 2 million jobs.”
“This is not about jobs,” Kessler explains. “It’s about workers — and the choices they make.”
Here’s
what all the nonsense is about. Buried on page 123 of the 182-page CBO
report, it states: “CBO estimates that the ACA will reduce the total
number of hours worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent to 2.0 percent
during the period from 2017 to 2024, almost entirely because workers
will choose to supply less labor — given the new taxes and other
incentives they will face and the financial benefits some will receive.”
In other words, because premium subsidies and other incentives will be available, some workers will eventually be able to
choose to
not continue working, simply because they need the healthcare coverage afforded by their employment.
“Specifically,
CBO estimates that the ACA will cause a reduction of roughly 1 percent
in aggregate labor compensation over the 2017–2024 period, compared with
what it would have been otherwise,” the report says. “The estimated
reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of
labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in
businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a
reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to
what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in
unemployment.”
As White House spokesman Jay Carney explained after
the report was released on Tuesday: “At the beginning of this year, we
noted that as part of this new day in health care, Americans would no
longer be trapped in a job just to provide coverage for their families,
and would have the opportunity to pursue their dreams,” he said. “This
CBO report bears that out, and the Republican plan to repeal the ACA
would strip those hard-working Americans of that opportunity.”
This is about people
choosing to
not work as long in life or as many hours. (Moreover, those jobs could
then become available to others still seeking more work.) In short, the
CBO’s numbers were not about the loss of
jobs, at all. It’s really not all that complicated, unless you’d like to lie to the American people about it.
Now,
you are welcome to disagree with the CBO numbers, or Carney’s or
Kessler’s or our interpretation of them. (As usual, you don’t need to
simply trust us. We’ve given you the links to the actual reports. Read
them and decide for yourself.) You are welcome to think it’s an outrage
that people might choose to work less when they are ill, because they
don’t have to keep working in order to pay for healthcare. You are
welcome to hate Obamacare all you like and demand its complete repeal,
just as you are welcome to call for the approval of the Keystone XL
pipeline, if you like the idea of shipping the world’s dirtiest fossil
fuel product across a continent of drinking water in order to ship gas
to China.
But when you’ve got to
lie, repeatedly, about
demonstrable, independently verifiable facts, then you are not a
legitimate advocate that deserves to be taken seriously.
The
Republican Party has given up on advocating seriously for whatever
policy positions they believe in. They are far past that, and have now
simply taken to lying in hopes of scamming Americans into voting for
them and buying into their policies.
That is not the earmark of a
serious policymaking organization, and it is for that reason that we —
sadly — no longer regard the Republican Party as a legitimate political
body.
That’s not good for America
or for Democrats, for that matter. But it just happens to be the sad truth.
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