Boehner and the budget

Dana Milbank, normally a don't-rock-the-boat columnist, goes hard over Boehner and his calls for the elimination of government jobs created under Obama:

Well, Mr. Speaker, I do. I checked with budget expert Scott Lilly of the Center for American Progress, and, using the usual multipliers, he calculated that the cuts - a net of $59 billion in the last half of fiscal 2011 - would lead to the loss of 650,000 government jobs, and the indirect loss of 325,000 more jobs as fewer government workers travel and buy things. That's nearly 1 million jobs - possibly enough to tip the economy back into recession.
So be it?
Let's assume that Boehner is not as heartless as his words sound. Let's accept that he really believes, as he put it, that "if we reduce spending we'll create a better environment for job creation in America." A more balanced budget would indeed improve the jobs market - in the long run.
But in the short run, the cuts Boehner and his caucus propose would cause a shock to the economy that would slow, if not reverse, the recovery. And however pure Boehner's motives may be, the dirty truth is that a stall in the recovery would bring political benefits to the Republicans in the 2012 elections. It is in their political interests for unemployment to remain higher for the next two years. "So be it" is callous but rational. (emphasis mine)

Steve Benen adds to the story:

What's more, PolitiFact looked into Boehner's claim about 200,000 new federal jobs and found that the Speaker's claim just isn't true. This is important -- Boehner wants to force hundreds of thousands of Americans from their jobs, deliberately, and he's basing this decision in part on a statistic that he's simply made up.
How'd this guy even get to be Speaker in the first place? What kind of national leader looks at a 9% unemployment rate and presents a plan to knowingly make it worse?

Things are going to get worse before they get better.  Hopefully it dawns on Republicans that taxes will have to go up, but they seem to be pretty damn dense.

Update: According to Politifact, Boehner claims that about 50,000 of the 200,000 jobs he is talking about were temporary Census jobs which were converted into full-time equivalent numbers.  So 50,000 of those jobs were created to carry out a federal duty laid out in the Constitution, and they are already gone.  Please, STFU.