Tea Party darling and potential vice-presidential candidate Florida Senator Macro Rubio may want to stop himself from repeatedly proposing legislation with the expressed purpose of killing jobs if he wants to be of any help to his party in the 2012 election.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., recently announced that he is cosponsoring a bill that would drastically cut public sector jobs. S. 1611, or the “Reducing the Size of the Federal Government Through Attrition Act,” would reduce the federal workforce by 10 percent by 2015.
According to a press release from Rubio’s office, the bill “would save approximately $139 billion over ten years.”
The bill is one example in a long line of legislation introduced by conservative policymakers in Congress this year aimed at making a political statement about the role of the federal government. Rubio himself has introduced S.726, the “Decrease Spending Now Act,” which has similar aims. The bill would impose deeper cuts to public sector jobs around the country. Public sector jobs, in particular, are already in sharp decline.
If you do the math, as Marie Diamond of ThinkProgress did, a 10 percent cut to federal employees would mean eliminating 440,000 jobs.
Of course, the Republicans can propose eliminating half a million jobs and your corporate media will still treat them as serious people trying to do serious things.
After all, government jobs aren't real jobs anyway. Right?
By the way, reducing the strength of an entity "through attrition" strikes me as the kind of terminology one would use when describing their strategy to wage war on an enemy, but that would make sense, as the Republican party is waging a war against the American public.