Basically good-if-not great news throughout today’s payroll report from the Department of Labor. My basic breakdown is here. But I also want to emphasize that it, and basically all recent economic data, underscores the folly of a new debt limit fight.

Obviously I’m not saying that playing games with the debt ceiling would be legitimate way for Republicans to extract political concessions if the economy weren’t recovering, or if it were recovering more slowly. But at least they’d have a pretense to argue that the country required immediate policy changes to address an existing economic crisis.

The fact that we’re actually recovering from an economic crisis gives the lie to the whole debt limit hostage-taking project. It’s not about rescuing the economy from policies that are inhibiting growth right now. It’s about a nihilistic willingness to destroy actual growth in order to make progress on longer-term ideological goals.

Brian Beutler

Brian Beutler is TPM's senior congressional reporter. Since 2009, he's led coverage of health care reform, Wall Street reform, taxes, the GOP budget, the government shutdown fight, and the debt limit fight. He can be reached at brian@talkingpointsmemo.com.