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Last year, when the House Republican leadership introduced its budget, they tried to pretend that giant tax cuts for the wealthy and the obliteration of most government functions would create jobs.

They commissioned right-wing propaganda shop The Heritage Foundation to cook up numbers saying the budget would drive down the unemployment rate to 4% by 2015. The analysis was widely discredited, Heritage was forced to backtrack and no independent economist ever projected that the budget would create a single job.

This year, the House Republicans have released a sequel. LIke many sequels, it's lame rehash of the original.

But what's interesting this time around is: the House Republicans aren't bothering to try to prove their budget would create jobs.

They appear not to have asked anyone to provide a jobs estimate -- legit or cooked.

House Budget Chair Paul Ryan's oped in yesterday's Wall Street Journal makes no jobs predictions at all, and in fact, only mentions jobs once: a flimsy claim that the budget's proposed "territorial" tax system would "end the practice of hitting businesses with extra taxes when they invest profits earned abroad in jobs and factories here at home."

(In reality, a territorial tax system only would create a massive tax loophole for multinational corporations, which would, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, give corporations incentive to "disguise U.S. profits as foreign profits" and "shift actual operations — and jobs — to other countries.")

The Heritage Foundation itself appears shamed. Its "First Reactions" statement literally doesn't mentions jobs at all.

Two years ago, Republicans took over the House on the cry of "Where Are The Jobs?" And in the last two years, following the President's Recovery Act, nearly four million private sector jobs have been created.

But we're still trying to find where the Republican jobs ideas are.

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